Evan Kindley is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.

With the stories of a handful of prominent modernist poet-critics, [Kindley] traces the shift in culture from the private stewardship of artists to their employment by academic institutions between the 1920s and ’50s…What Kindley’s excellent and thorough history shows us is that, more than anything else, writers have found a way to navigate the gap between the cultural importance of their work and a market that does not wish to fund it. Kindley has an innate understanding of the uncomfortable relationships between artists and the power structures that simultaneously bolster and diminish their projects. For all their individual difficulties and peculiarities, the historical figures who feature prominently in this story are treated, rightly, as people who wanted what was best for their art. Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture reminds us that the systems that support writers did not change by themselves. Writers changed them, and if they see fit, maybe, they could change them again.

Evan Kindley is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.

With the stories of a handful of prominent modernist poet-critics, [Kindley] traces the shift in culture from the private stewardship of artists to their employment by academic institutions between the 1920s and ’50s…What Kindley’s excellent and thorough history shows us is that, more than anything else, writers have found a way to navigate the gap between the cultural importance of their work and a market that does not wish to fund it. Kindley has an innate understanding of the uncomfortable relationships between artists and the power structures that simultaneously bolster and diminish their projects. For all their individual difficulties and peculiarities, the historical figures who feature prominently in this story are treated, rightly, as people who wanted what was best for their art. Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture reminds us that the systems that support writers did not change by themselves. Writers changed them, and if they see fit, maybe, they could change them again.

Evan Kindley is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.

With the stories of a handful of prominent modernist poet-critics, [Kindley] traces the shift in culture from the private stewardship of artists to their employment by academic institutions between the 1920s and ’50s…What Kindley’s excellent and thorough history shows us is that, more than anything else, writers have found a way to navigate the gap between the cultural importance of their work and a market that does not wish to fund it. Kindley has an innate understanding of the uncomfortable relationships between artists and the power structures that simultaneously bolster and diminish their projects. For all their individual difficulties and peculiarities, the historical figures who feature prominently in this story are treated, rightly, as people who wanted what was best for their art. Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture reminds us that the systems that support writers did not change by themselves. Writers changed them, and if they see fit, maybe, they could change them again.