Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation by Aldon Lynn Nielsen

Abstract

220 Reviews by theartificial categories of academic literarystudies, and especially by that strangely selective construct known as 'Thirties Poetry', Auden's reputation is sustained chiefly by poets and by an appreciative general public thatcan still recognize him as thegreat estEnglish-born poet ofhis century.A small band of academic scholars,most of them rounded up by Stan Smith for thisCambridge Companion, also shows an affirming flame. With the centenary ofAuden's birth almost upon us, there is still no academic 'Auden industry' on the scale of those devoted toYeats, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, although the foundations forone are being laid inEdward Mendelson's ongoing Com plete Works and in an associated series of critical editions. Stan Smith is a serialAudenist who has alreadywritten two short books on thepoet and is now atwork on a critical edition of The Orators. His editorial design in this Companion brings in rathermore contributors than isusual in the series, and within tighter word-limits, so that the strain of compression sometimes tellsupon theiressays as they race through a forty-five-yearliterary career. This plan of contents, though, has thegreatmerit of allowing the full range ofAuden's work tobe considered: notjust thepoems in almost every formand genre but theplays, the libretti, the travelbooks, thecritical essays, and themiscellaneous prose.We startwith a pithily aphoristic sur vey ofAuden's lifeand character by his biographer Richard Davenport-Hines, then move through a trioof essays on the threephases ofAuden's literarycareer-English, American, and European-before we reach a series of generic studies, including a stimulating consideration of theprose works byTony Sharpe and a valuable piece on the light verse by Stan Smith himself, which before long devours thewhole aeuvre. The second part of theCompanion is more various and thematic,with essays by Peter Porter on Auden's styles; JohnLucas on Auden's political positions and theirdebts toE. M. Forster; Rod Mengham on Auden's debts toGeorg Groddeck and Homer Lane and his distance fromFreudian orthodoxy; Richard R. Bozorth on Auden and sexuality (another of those illimitable topics); and Paola Marchetti on Auden's land scapes. Gareth Reeves's essay onAuden and religion isnotable for itscareful analysis of 'Horae Canonicae', while Rainer Emig's account of 'Auden and Ecology' is a good deal more sophisticated than one has a right to expect under such a title.The volume is rounded off in a party spiritwith Ian Sansom's 'Auden and Influence', a lively review of improbableWystan trivia. In an ideal Companion, one would look perhaps formore material on Auden's debts to such figures as T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence, but otherwise the scope of this book is highly commendable, while its merits in termsof readable prose are enhanced by its inclusion of voices from outside the academy (Davenport-Hines, Porter, Sansom). It deserves to go straight to the top of the reading list forany undergraduate or postgraduate course inwhich Auden's work appears. GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON CHRIS BALDICK IntegralMusic: Languages of African American Innovation. By ALDON LYNN NIELSEN. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2004. Xvii+2I8 pp. $26.95. ISBN 978-o-8I73-5I39-7. Undoubtedly, this is an important book. As the second book in a projected trilogy of critical accounts of experimental Black poetry inAmerica (that began with Black Chant: Languages ofAfrican American Postmodernism (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1997)), itcontinues and develops Aldon Lynn Nielsen's argument that black aesthetics play a central role in the formation ofAmerican modernity and post modernity. Indeed, the book is remarkably successful indefending itsassertion that 'black arts are at the very core of themodern' (p. I90), and itsdetailed examination MLR, 102. I, 2007 22I of thework of fiveexperimental black poets of the twentiethcentury solidly supports itsattempt tomake visible thatblackness which-it argues-modernity has covered over.Of the fivepoets discussed-Russell Atkins, Stephen Jonas,Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, and JayneCortez-only Baraka might be thought of as having any real visibility within American literaryhistory, and that (ironically, perhaps) because of his association with white poetic avant-gardes such as theBlack Mountain and New York 'schools'. But Nielsen's account of thesewriters ismore than a simple attempt tobring the four lesser-known poets into thekind...