Chapter 5 - Wallace Stevens, Stanley Burnshaw, and the Defense of Poetry in an Age of Economic Determinism

Summary

Writing at the precise moment of the stock market “crash” of 1929, and the onset of the Great Depression, the philosopher and public intellectual, John Dewey declared flatly: “Economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory.” Ours is a “money culture,” he said (Dewey 119, 9), simply stating as anthropological fact what is our cultural experience. After the crash, economic determinism and therefore economic reform, if not revolution, seemed more than ever the key to the vicissitudes of modernity. It was the crash, critic Edmund Wilson noted, which made him turn to Das Kapital (Wilson 495). Kenneth Burke, at the same time, for the same reasons, found himself taking “avid notes on corporate devices whereby business enterprisers had contrived to build up empires by purely financial manipulations” (Burke 214). On the Left, Louis Zukofsky’s “Song 27” (1934) explicitly directed readers to Capital, Chapter 3, “Money or the Circulation of Commodities,” and other passages from Marx (Zukofsky 58–61). On the Right, Ezra Pound included two pages of quotes from Capital, Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” in Canto XXXIII (33/162–163).