- [UNTITLED]
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- List of Contributors
- A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present
- Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies
- American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism
- “Jeweled Bindings”: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality
- Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem
- Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore
- Poetry and Rhetoric: Modernism and Beyond
- Cézanne’s Ideal of “Realization”: A Useful Analogy for the Spirit of Modernity in American Poetry
- Stepping Out, Sitting In: Modern Poetry’s Counterpoint with Jazz and the Blues
- Out with the Crowd: Modern American Poets Speaking to Mass Culture
- Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry Scene, 1920–1960
- Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America
- “With Ambush and Stratagem”: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War
- The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry
- Asian American Poetry
- “The Pardon of Speech”: The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry
- American Poetry, Prayer, and the News
- The Tranquillized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry
- The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960
- Fieldwork in New American Poetry: From Cosmology to Discourse
- “Do our chains offend you?”: The Poetry of American Political Prisoners
- Disability Poetics
- Green Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Criticism
- Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry
- “Internationally Known”: The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop
- Minding Machines/Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface
- POETS’ INDEX
- SUBJECT INDEX
Abstract and Keywords
This article identifies poets' engagements with material problems of manual labor that a more elitist critical aesthetic had preferred to ignore. It offers readings of two of the mostly frequently anthologized poems in the modern American poetry canon: Robert Frost's “The Death of the Hired Man” and T. S. Eliot's “Preludes.” Each can suggest the integral but long-neglected role that the labor problem and those who lived it—that is, the poor and working class—would play in the formation of canonical modern American poetry. Although they confront vastly different labor problems—hired laborers versus urban slums and prostitutes—both poems nevertheless wrestle with the claims such problems (and the human figures behind such problems) should make upon observers' sympathies.
Keywords: manual labor, Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man, T. S. Eliot, Preludes
John Marsh is Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941 and the author of two forthcoming books, Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry and Class Dismissed: Why We Can't Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality.
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- [UNTITLED]
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- List of Contributors
- A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present
- Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies
- American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism
- “Jeweled Bindings”: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality
- Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem
- Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore
- Poetry and Rhetoric: Modernism and Beyond
- Cézanne’s Ideal of “Realization”: A Useful Analogy for the Spirit of Modernity in American Poetry
- Stepping Out, Sitting In: Modern Poetry’s Counterpoint with Jazz and the Blues
- Out with the Crowd: Modern American Poets Speaking to Mass Culture
- Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry Scene, 1920–1960
- Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America
- “With Ambush and Stratagem”: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War
- The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry
- Asian American Poetry
- “The Pardon of Speech”: The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry
- American Poetry, Prayer, and the News
- The Tranquillized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry
- The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960
- Fieldwork in New American Poetry: From Cosmology to Discourse
- “Do our chains offend you?”: The Poetry of American Political Prisoners
- Disability Poetics
- Green Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Criticism
- Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry
- “Internationally Known”: The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop
- Minding Machines/Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface
- POETS’ INDEX
- SUBJECT INDEX
