Counter-revolution of the Word

During the Cold War an unlikely coalition of poets, editors, and politicians converged in an attempt to discredit — if not destroy — the American modernist avant-garde. Ideologically diverse yet willing to bespeak their hatred of modern poetry through the rhetoric of anticommunism, these “anticommunist antimodernists,” as Alan Filreis dubs them, joined associations such as the League for Sanity in Poetry to decry the modernist “conspiracy” against form and language. In Counter-revolution of the