Book Review: Situating Poetry: Covenant and Genre in American Modernism

10th June 2024

Dr. Erin Yanota, University of Virginia’s College at Wise

Joshua Logan Wall, Situating Poetry: Covenant and Genre in American Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022)

How did voices at the margins of modernism in the United States – and the United States of America itself – create publics by appealing to the civil religious discourses central to national self-definition? This question is one that Joshua Logan Wall sets out to answer in Situating Poetry. The book focuses on four poets – James Weldon Johnson, Charles Reznikoff, Lola Ridge, Louis Zukofsky – and one ‘limit case’ (15), in Robert Hayden – and it recontextualises these writers’ poems in the original settings of their publication and circulation.^[1] Using a multiethnic approach, Situating Poetry shows how these five poets use modernist formal strategies – like those that characterise documentary poetics, for instance – to political effect. These strategies enable the poets to establish relations of solidarity. But they also use poetic form to identify, critique, and even seek to repair the broken covenants of national discourses like the American Dream, or the biblical typologies that claim the United States as a safe haven and ‘Promised Land’ for other nations’ exiles.