New Materialism and Late Modernist Poetry

First appearing in the social sciences in the last decade, the New Materialism offers a fresh way of looking at the ways in which humanity views its relationship to the material world. This book picks up on those key insights, analyzing poetry drawn from the period known as late modernism (roughly 1930s–1970s) that challenge the anthropocentric worldview that has defined Western thinking for millennia. The poets include influential figures representing various anglophone traditions, especially Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach,” Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, David Jones’s The Anathemata, Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery, Louis Zukofsky’s “A,” and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. A concluding chapter briefly looks ahead to the persistence of materialist thinking in a key postmodernist text: Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets. As New Materialism teaches, and these texts demonstrate, a renewed reckoning of humanity’s interaction with the material world can help engender a greater self-awareness that humanity is not the only, or best, measure of the universe.