Steven Gould Axelrod

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. By Milton A. Cohen. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 266.

From the outset, Cotlar carefully distinguishes between Jefferson’s Democratic Party and the democratic movement that preceded it, one that focused far less on candidates and elections than it did on the creation of a cosmopolitan citizenry, a just economy, and a powerful public sphere. A conspicuous strength of the book is the clarity with which it represents these historical problems in the form of questions: What does it mean to be a citizen of the world? How can commerce foster equality and enable people to live freer lives? What are the responsibilities and tasks of citizens between elections? Cotlar poses these questions because the self-described democrats of the 1790s did so. Of course, most Americans, including Jeffersonian Democrats, rejected cosmopolitan thinking and calls for economic justice by the end of the century in favor of a democratic vision that equated political action with voting. Conventional wisdom tells us that Americans simply eschewed what they perceived as the anarchic excess of revolution, spectacularly dramatized by the Jacobin Terror and, closer to home, by the Whiskey Rebellion. Tom Paine’s America reveals the complex and confrontational nature of this counterrevolutionary movement as it unfolded discursively in the pages of newspapers and in the meeting rooms of political societies. What makes this story so remarkable is not that moneyed, elite interests won out but that in order for them to do so, democracy itself had to be redefined.

32.50.)

1. The Hawk in the Rain 2. Lupercal 3. Wodwo 4. Crow 5. Prometheus on his Crag 6. Season Songs 7. Cave Birds 8. Gaudete.