State Verse Scandals: The Bollingen Affair and Postwar Poets at the Library of Congress, 1945- -- Inaugurating National Poetry: Robert Frost and Cold War Arts, 1956- -- The Politics of Voice: The Poet-Critic, the Creative Writer, and the Poet Laureate: 1965- -- Civil Versus Civic Verse: National Projects of U.S. Poets Laureate, 1990- -- "An Invisible Berlin Wall": The Cold War, the U.S. Inaugural Poem, and the Future of State Verse -- Appendix I. Occupants of the U.S. National Poetry Office -- Appendix II. Fellows in American Letters at The Library of Congress -- Appendix III. U.S. Inaugural Poets.
Summary:
"In 1961 at the height of the cold war, Robert Frost became the first poet to ever read at a Presidential inauguration. One year later, he led a mission to Moscow to help ease tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. Some 50 years later, Richard Blanco, who read at Obama's second inauguration, was commissioned by the State Department to read at the re-opening of the American embassy in Cuba. Between these two bookends to the Cold War, poetry played an important role in the expression of American power and ideology. As Amy Paeth contends, poetry's role at these events reflects the intertwined relationship between the American state, private foundations, the university and poetry. At the symbolic and administrative center of this relationship is the poet laureateship. The American Poet Laureate argues that the American state is the silent center of poetic production in the United States after World War II. The poet laureateship not only stands as a symbol of "American poetry" it also sits at the nexus of political, cultural, and economic organizations that supported and funded American poetry. These organizations, ranging from the CIA and the NEA to MFA programs and the Lilly pharmaceutical company, resulted in private-public partnerships that help to shape and promote a certain vision of American poetry. Paeth examines the work of laureates such as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Billy Collins and the development of what became a national poetic voice that emphasized the expressive agency of the individual citizen. This idealization of a certain practice of poetry proved flexible enough to serve the aims of mid-century cold war nationalism and the later project of multicultural, neoliberal identity formation"-- Provided by publisher.
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