MODERNISM AND FASCISM IN AMERICAN LETTERS
MODERNISM AND FASCISM IN AMERICAN LETTERS

Summary/Abstract: American Modernism has two major ideological components: a fascist and a humanist one. The Fascist constituent is famously represented by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, intellectual purists and prophets of aesthetic freedom. Mythologizing a past that rejects the humanity of the present they destroyed the live humanity of their present. They retreated to European descent culture, based on hierarchically imposed art, where the artist is a monarch selecting his royal court and spitefully annulling the country he is supposed to understand. Art was supposed to get regenerated, i.e. to obliterate the contemporary modern man and revive the cultural bodies lying in the cemetery of the past: a world of royal mummies. The New Critics (John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks) went through stages of intellectual creative formation in parallel with, or crisscrossing, Modernism in American letters - the Nashville group philosophical meetings at Vanderbilt University, the poetical Fugitives, the nativist organicist South Agrarians, the proto-Fascist theoreticians in The American Review, the New Criticism promoters - that explain their authoritarian, public space exclusive, purist aestheticist critical method. The F/fascist (both political and philosophical) stage in their evolution was not incidental but the natural ingredient of a consistent group mentality evolution. This article tackles the very story of their intellectual development that highlights the importance of the F/fascist (political and/or philosophical) component of American modernism.

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