Thomas McGrath, T. S. Eliot, and the Commissars of Culture

Ian Peddie

doi:10.1353/wal.2006.0012

Exile and the Republic: Thomas McGrath and the Legacy of Jefferson's America

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300006256 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 23 ◽

pp. 23-38

Author(s):

David Haven Blake

Keyword(s):

American Revolution ◽

18Th Century ◽

American Empire ◽

Modernist Poetry ◽

Self Reliance ◽

Thomas Mcgrath ◽

The Republic ◽

The Many ◽

Usable Past ◽

Willful Defiance

Of the many authorities Thomas McGrath rejected during his life, one of the most significant was the American Revolution, for his work explicitly questions the founders as a source of aesthetic and political creativity. “The National Past has its houses,” he writes in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, “but their fires have long gone out!” From his pronouncing the death of Virginia's deified presidents to his condemnation of the “local colorist” hunting for patriotic “HEADwaters” by which to camp, the poet's renunciation of the “false Past” amounts to a coherent commentary on the relations between American politics and modernist poetry (Letter, 315). E. P. Thompson has remarked in paving homage to his friend that “McGrath is a poet of alienation…. His trajectory has been that of willful defiance … At every point when the applause – anyone's applause, even the applause of the alienated – seemed about to salute him, he has taken a jagged fork to a wilderness of his own making.” Although his language strongly recalls that of Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” Thompson views McGrath as more than a romantic individualist. McGrath's alienation was not simply the estrangement that Marx saw afflicting all of capitalist society, nor was it a momentarily fashionable pose; rather, it was a calculated and thorough opposition to what Thompson calls “official culture” and its destruction of political, historical, and literary values. McGrath's refusal to make a “usable past” out of the American Revolution participates in this general defiance of “official culture,” as his work insistently reminds us that among the regular patrons of Monticello and Mt. Vernon were the many establishment poets well entrenched in bourgeois universities. In defying modernism's efforts to renovate the 18th century, McGrath makes a wilderness of his own, a wilderness which grows in opposition to the wellplowed fields of American empire.

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