Tactics and Tradition in the Poetry of Thomas McGrath

Thomas McGrath (1916-1990) is the kind of literary figure scholars interested in canon revision dream of finding: an arguably major twentieth-century American poet whose work has gone almost unnoticed by academics, and one whose signature poetic concerns and strategies require research into theoretical issues of canonicity and literary history. Born in the agrarian socialist hotbed of North Dakota, his father a one-time I. W. W. member, his mother a devout Catholic (and her family Gaelic-speaking), McGrath became a Communist Party member in the 1930s, a close student of Cleanth Brooks's at Louisiana State University in the year of the publication of Modern Poetry and the Tradition, a radical organizer on the 1940s New York City waterfront, a Rhodes Scholar, the first poet published by Alan Swallow, and a Los Angeles teacher and screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s. McGrath's career both places him at a number of important moments in this century's political and literary history and at the same time shows how he has slipped through the cracks in the canonization process; yet his work remains in print today and widely read.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Smith, Donald Sinclair

Contributors dc:contributor

• Nelson, Cary

• Literature, American

Identifier

(UMI)AAI9543728

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/69476