Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets by Lisa M. Steinman

Abstract

130 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE epilogue should have been made prologue, for then the reader would have been fully prepared for the passion and reformist zeal that are the hallmarks of Mumford’s thought. Arthur P. Molella Dr. Molella is chairman of the Department of the History of Science and Tech­ nology at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. He is currently working on a book about the intellectual origins of the history of technology. Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets. By Lisa M. Steinman. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Pp. xiv + 219; notes, index. $20.00. American poets in the early decades of this century faced cultural competition from industrial designers transforming automobiles and plumbing into objects of beauty, from visual artists abstracting a mod­ ernist aesthetic from images of turbines and smokestacks, and from physicists graphing Held discontinuities that appeared to extend into consciousness itself. Rather than denounce Americans as philistines besotted with technology, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore claimed for poets what seemed then a radical kinship with engineers as Aristotelian “makers.” Moreover, said Williams, a poem was a “ma­ chine made of words.” By contrast, Wallace Stevens mistrusted tech­ nology, asserting that poetry’s very “uselessness” was an index of its value, but like Williams and Moore he eventually turned to “imprac­ tical” science to validate his craft. As filtered through Whitehead and other popularizers, relativity and quantum theory seemed to justify the subjectivity and ambiguity of the poet. Made in America acknowl­ edges that none of these cultural defenses were persuasive to audi­ ences or, ultimately, to the writers themselves. Lisa Steinman believes that they were crucial nonetheless to the development of modernist sensibilities in American poetry. Her account of the dilemma of these poets in a machine age would be more valuable if it examined their strategies less as cultural reflex and more as inquiries into the nature of literature. Employing sci­ entific analogies to sanction poetic practice is problematic; quantum physicists embrace paradox and subjectivity only when they have ex­ hausted rational alternatives, whereas such ambiguities are givens for poets. Similarly, crude machine metaphors can obscure the actual technological functions of poetry (and it is somewhat ironic that poets should adopt such metaphors just as scientists were discarding me­ chanical models). Williams came close to recognizing that machines resembled poems not just because they were assembled from parts but because both embodied information: “knowledge,” he observed, “is a machine.” In fact, poetry as an information technology was not exempt from the kind of evolutionary changes occurring in rival me­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 131 dia like motion pictures and radio. Whitman had abandoned rhyme as unnecessary for storage and display, Dickinson had stripped poetic syntax of redundancy, and Pound and Eliot were recoding genres to accommodate more data, with Eliot complaining about the informa­ tion explosion. Williams himself wrote learnedly on the variable foot in verse as an analog to radioactive decay. All three of the poets that Steinman discusses enlarged their medium’s capacity for transmitting messages of enormous sophistication. Viewed from a present in which poetry is a commodity in an information economy, these poets seem, not too bold in claiming affinities between poetry and technology, but too timid. It would be unfair to expect writers of the 1920s and 1930s to understand what we see through hindsight, of course, and it is im­ portant to follow their thinking at the time. Because Steinman tracks down a great many references to science and technology in the work of Williams, Moore, and Stevens, Made in America provides an ex­ haustive record valuable to literary scholars. General readers may wish that the information was distilled, but historians interested in the relationship of technology and literature during this period can be grateful for Steinman’s thoroughness. Joseph W. Slade Dr. Slade is chairman of the Department of Media Arts and director of the Com­ munications Center at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. He is the author of Thomas Pynchon (1974) and articles on technology and literature. Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895—1984. By Paul Brians. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press...