[MUSIC] When The Waste Land appeared, Williams realized he was in firm opposition to elitist cultural ambitions. Meanwhile, he maintained fellow traveler status with the radical left. Publishing in Communist party affiliated magazines and supporting the cause of the Spanish Republic from 1937 to 1939. And he was moved to create complex mixed genres that combined political reflection with Dadaist uses of his signature transparent ordinary speech. Other vibrant early to mid 20th century movements, some once again centered in New York, were devoted not to breaking with earlier traditions but rather with updating or transforming them. I take the moment of 1898 to 99, as one key modern origin, earlier of course than the standard story. Though not all the poets participating in that moment of consolidating political and social critique, were in the least aware of one another's work. But within given literary and ethnic communities, there was a strong sense of common cause and mission. The historical impetus was dual, but somewhat comfortably motivated. The final push to eliminate the last vestiges of Native American independence and the US war in the Philippines. Both events occasioned powerful anti-imperialist poetry of a sort the US had really not seen before. Among the Five Nations, we saw, or we could have seen had we known to look, Native American poetry written in criticism of American empire. Poetry that linked racism in the Philippines to racism in the American West. And in Boston, New York, and elsewhere in the East we saw anti-war poetry that was also anti-imperialist and anti-racist. It's a tradition that then sustained itself throughout the rest of the 20th century and beyond. Taking us through the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Power Movement, the Vietnam War, and the War in Iraq. To insist that modern poetry begins in 1910 or 1913, is to involve yourself In a studied effort to marginalize, disempower or wholly erase the very notion of an anti-racist and anti-imperialist tradition. That synthesizes the resistance to empire in the U.S. and links it to comparable struggles in Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. All scholars including myself have assumed for long that it was not until the 1960s that individual Native American poets decided to write poems in English. As supposed to traditional chants and songs which were often not only anonymous but also transcribed and adapted for English speaking audiences by missionaries or anthropologists. Only recently has the rich 19th and 20th century tradition of Native American poems in traditional verse forms been recovered. A selection was not reprinted until the 2011 collection, Changing is Not Vanishing. Most of these poems were written for Native American newspapers and magazines and they simply never reached a larger American audience, and thus, most of the rest of us for 100 years and more didn't know about them. The poems at stake dealt not only with nature and with Indian culture and history, but also with national and international events. Parroting Edwin Markham's instantly famous 1899 poem The Man with the Hoe. Creek poet, Alexander Posey, in The Fall of the Redskin (1901), wrote of an Indian leaning, quote, against a witness tree. The emptiness of treaties in his face. He references the Boer War, then describes a comparable gaze from a Filipino, and we had invaded the Philippines at that point. A Filipino, humanity betrayed, plundered, profaned and disinherited. The Filipino cries protest to the judges of the courts, a protest that is also made in vain. Posey thus compares American imperialist aggression against people of color at home and abroad and links the various broken agreements that litter US history. In the White Man's Burden 1899 Too-qua-stee, also known as De Witt Clinton Duncan, a Cherokee, parodies Rudyard Kipling's infamous poem of the same title and takes up God's voice. Go tell those white men, I, the Lord of hosts, have marked their high presumption, heard their boasts. Should just minorities be made to yield that wrong majorities may be upheld? Once again the injustices against peoples of color here and elsewhere are linked. And the principles that could bring both of them justice are invoked. Quote, the red man, and the black, whom fate debars. From whited temples, see me in the stars. At the same moment that Too-qua-stee and other Native American poets were writing, the New England Anti-imperialists League issued Liberty Poems 1900. Offered quote as inspired by the crisis of 1898 to 1900. Among the other books of poems focused on the genocidal war in the Philippines published that year was Morrison I Swift's Advent of Empire. Like Posey and Too-qua-stee, Swift and the contributors to Liberty Poems understood that race was at the center of this crisis. A crisis provoked by imperialism that not only produced a murderous assault on the Philippine islands' inhabitants but also jeopardized American democracy and the ideal supposedly underwriting the nation's social contract. Edmund Vance Cook's Shoot Him Down opens, Ay, beat the Filipino back! All men are equal born and free, Was only meant for you and me. David Green Haskins Junior's What is the White Man's Burden characterized Kipling's poem as the Christian pirate's plea. In Henry Labouchere's Retort to Kipling, reprinted from the magazine London Truth, opens with this stanza. Pile on the brown man's burden, to gratify your greed. Go, clear away the niggers who progress would impede. Be very stern, for truly 'tis useless to be mild. With new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child. Kipling's poems was published in New York's McClure's Magazine in February, 1899 with the subtitle The United States and the Philippine Islands. And, it exhorted Americans to take full responsibility for their recent conquest. How much if any sarcasm Kipling intended in his characterizations of the Philippines as half-devil and half-child, a phrase Labouchere quotes directly, is unclear. Though Kipling does warn that as a colonial power, Americans will reap quote, the blame of those ye better, the blame of those ye guard. in any case, the poem treats colonialism as a historical inevitability, and has been repeatedly parodied and attacked, both in Liberty Poems and elsewhere. Liberty Poems reprints a poem from the New York literary periodical Ainsley's Magazine. And draws other poems, not only from Boston, but also from writers in Nashville, North Carolina, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Washington, and various towns and cities in New York State. It's unlikely that the East Coast members of the Anti-Imperialist League were reading Indian Journal or Daily Chieftain, the venues in which The Fall of the Redskin and The White Man's Burden respectively first appeared. Too-qua-stee's 125 line poem was reprinted the same year in Indian Chieftain. But that gave it wider distribution only within the Native American community. Though both groups of writers, both the white poets writing on the East Coast, and the Native American poets writing in the West, were quite familiar with abolitionist discourse of the 19th century. They were drawing on some of the same historical roots. Writing poems with parallel arguments and rhetoric and yet the two groups of poets had no idea for the most part of the other existed or at least the white poets had no idea that the Native American poets existed. The Native American poets were reading pretty widely. Posey did not have a true collected poems until 2008, which was the first time The Fall of the Redskin was reprinted in over 100 years. As a result, critical comments on his poetry are painfully misinformed. What we do know now is that American Indians were following the news, reading widely, and writing rhymed and unrhymed metered political poems of considerable ambition. The constellation of these two turn of the century groups of anti-racist anti-imperialist poetry now possible to place in dialogue with one another. Unearth the multifaceted tradition that had a major resurgence with Claude McKay and Langston Hughes in the New York of the 1910s and the 1920s. And that gathered further strength as we'll see later in the course, with poets of the left in the red decade of the 1930s. [MUSIC]
