Collected Poems (American Poetry Recovery Series) - Softcover

Gordon, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252066405 ISBN 13: 9780252066405

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1997

Synopsis

This long-overdue collection, which gathers together more than two hundred poems written over a span of six decades, along with an extended biographical analysis by Fred Whitehead, permits a comprehensive assessment of the work of a man Thomas McGrath described as "one of the very best of the revolutionary poets."
 
Don Gordon made his name in the 1930s as a passionate and outspoken political poet, his work being published in the most prestigious American journals. In spite of his growing literary reputation he was called before the Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. House or Representatives in September, 1951. Due to his openly communist views and his reluctance to give the committee names of fellow radical writers, Gordon was blacklisted from employment in the film industry. He devoted his time to writing poems, despite the difficulty of finding a wide audience for them.
 
Many of Gordon's poems are suffused with themes of revolution and political activism, but this collection showcases the breadth of the subjects he addressed in his sixty years of writing, expressed with a rigorous aesthetic sensibility in a style that incorporates diverse influences, including modernism and surrealism.
 
"Don Gordon is great," Meridel LeSueur wrote, "because he shows the vigorous and wondrous strength of the people." With this complete collection of his poems, readers can at last experience the full range of this vigorous and challenging writer.
 

About this title

From the Back Cover

Edwin Rolfe's Collected Poems brings together the body of his work that we believe will be of greatest use to those readers with a general interest in American political poetry and with a specific interest in Rolfe himself. It gives people for the first time a comprehensive view of one of the more inventive political poets of the Great Depression, of the writer Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War regard as their poet laureate, and of a writer who used poetry as a weapon against the reactionary politics that dominated the United States in the 1950s.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252066405
• ISBN 13: 9780252066405
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Whitehead Fred