Milton A. Cohen – författare

This Norton Critical Edition includes:166 poems spanning the range of Cummings’s career, selections of his prose and dramatic writing, twelve paintings and sketches, and three facsimiles of his drafts—the first ever annotated and cross-genre collection of his work aimed at student readers.Annotations, headnotes and a thorough introduction by Milton A. Cohen, along with an essay by Cohen chronicling the development of Cummings’s idiosyncratic style.Four contemporary reviews and six critical essays—by Randall Jarrell, Edmund Wilson, Isabelle Alfandary and Michael Webster, among others—prefaced by an overview.Comparative studies of two poems—featuring five different responses to each—designed to promote classroom discussion.A chronology, a selected bibliography and an index of the poems.

The years before World War I were a fertile period for artists in Europe and the United States who were challenging aesthetic convention in music, writing, and the visual arts. These early pioneers of modernism sometimes preferred to work alone, but just as often they were associated with groups whose boundaries were permeable and freely changing. While these individual groups—including the Futurists, Imagists, Blue Rider, and the Second Vienna School—have been thoroughly studied, scholars of the period have often neglected the formative and pervasive interactions of these groups across geographic and artistic boundaries. Providing a historical taxonomy of this influential milieu, Milton Cohen demonstrates how these groups were largely responsible for the artistic innovation and nearly all the avant-garde agitation and major events of these years. With concluding appendices intended for scholars and specialists, this engagingly written book will be useful not only for classroom use and scholarly research, but will appeal to anyone interested in reading a fresh approach to the history of early modernism.

 

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Williams Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. As other writers moved sharply to the Left, and as leftist critics promulgated a proletarian aesthetics, these modernist poets keenly felt the pressure of the times and politicized literary scene. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement.  Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of these responses: what these four poets wrote—in letters, essays, lectures, fiction (for Williams), and most importantly, in their poems; what they believed politically and aesthetically; how critics, particularly leftist critics, reviewed their work; how these poets reacted to that criticism and to the broader milieu of leftism. Each poet’s response and its subsequent impact on his poetic output is a unique case study of the conflicting demands of art and politics in a time of great social change. 

Illuminates the development of Hemingway’s themes and techniques and his future course as a stylist and writer. In 1924 Ernest Hemingway published a small book of eighteen vignettes, each little more than one page long, with a small press in Paris. Titled in our time, the volume was later absorbed into Hemingway’s story collection In Our Time. Those vignettes, as Milton Cohen demonstrates in Hemingway’s Laboratory, reveal a range of voices, narrative strategies, and fictional interests more wide-ranging and experimental than any other extant work of Hemingway’s. Further, they provide a vivid view of his earliest tendencies and influences, first manifestations of the style that would become his hallmark, and daring departures into narrative forms that he would forever leave behind.  Many of the chapters are pointillistic glimpses of violence--bullfights, a botched execution, the fleeting thoughts of the wounded on the battlefield. Others reach back into childhood. Still others adopt the wry, mannered voice of English aristocracy. Though critics have often read these chapters as secondary asides to the longer stories that constitute the commercial collection, Cohen argues that not only do the vignettes merit consideration as a unit unto themselves, but that they exhibit a plethora of styles and narrative gambits that show Hemingway at his most versatile. The final section examines in detail the individual chapters of in our time, their historical origins, their drafts, themes, and styles. The result is an account of what is arguably Hemingway’s most crucial formative period.   

In the late 1930s, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway wrote novels that won critical acclaim and popular success: The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. All three writers were involved with the Left at the time, and that commitment informed their fiction. Milton Cohen examines their motives for involvement with the Left; their novels’ political themes; and why they separated from the Left after the novels were published. These writers were deeply conflicted about their political commitments, and Cohen explores the tensions that arose between politics and art, resulting in the abandonment of a political attachment.

Axis/Axes to Grind studies various political themes in American World War II novels of three decades. These themes include “big picture” novels that interpret the war’s meaning and predict the postwar political climate (The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions) and novels that dramatize rebellions against military authority (From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny and Catch-22). “Political” also includes conflicts between various minorities and the dominant socio-political culture (White, Christian and heterosexual). Racial conflicts appear in If He Hollers Let Him Go, And Then We Heard the Thunder and Guard of Honor); subversive gay themes inform The Gallery; anti-Semitic conflicts appear in several novels, particularly the Holocaust novel Point of No Return. War novels written well after the war tend to see the war through the lens of the author's own times. Thus, the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war inform the pacifism in Slaughterhouse-Five. And in Gravity's Rainbow, the transnational cartels that enable the V-2 rocket attacks against England prefigure the military-industrial complex of Pynchon's time.