Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry

Between Two Fires is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing U.S. poetry through a consideration of overlooked radical poets of the mid-century, and then asking what such transactions tell us about the way that anglophone culture absorbed new models during this period. The Cold War synchronized culture across the globe, leading to similar themes, forms, and critical maneuvers. Poetry, a discourse routinely figured as distant from political concerns, was profoundly affected by the ideological pressures of the period. But beyond such mirroring, there were many movements across the Iron Curtain, despite the barriers of cultural and language difference, state security surveillance, spies, traitors and translators. Justin Quinn shows how such factors are integral to transnational cultural movements during this period, and have influenced even postwar anglophone poetry that is thematically distant from the Cold War. For the purposes of the study, Czech poetry--its writers, its translators, its critics--stands on the other side of the Iron Curtain as receptor and, which has been overlooked, part creator, of the anglophone tradition in this period. By stepping outside the frameworks by which Anglophone poetry is usually considered, we see figures such as Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, and Seamus Heaney, in a new way, with respect to the ideological mechanisms that were at work behind the promotion of the aesthetic as a category independent of political considerations, foremost among these postcolonial theory.

About the Author :
Justin Quinn is Associate Professor at the University of West Bohemia. He has published two studies of American poetry and the Cambridge Introduction to Irish Poetry (2008). A poet also, his most recent collection is Early House (2015).

Review :
"Between Two Fires provocatively revises and considerably expands the basis for considering political poetry in English from 1950 to 1990... Quinn writes as a poet-critic quick to recognize the heavy hand of literary politics, sharply aware of translation problems and ready to appreciate the power of poetic traditions in building solidarity across national borders." --Edward Brunner, The Review of English Studies "[Quinn] himself crossed several checkpoints and negotiated barriers that usually defeat authors of books about Cold War...a very rare book on poetry...surprising and fulfilling." --Irena Grudzinska Gross, Modern Philology "The central sections of Quinn's rich book will provide those scholars a useful model for thinking about how poetry, resilient under pressure, circulated and signified during the Cold War, as well as about how the Cold War and its poetry continue to shape the transnational literary dimensions of our own time." --Claire Seiler, Twentieth Century Literature "Justin Quinn's Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry signals a necessary refinement in explorations of the effects of the Cold War on major writers of the period. In this book, the tell-tale word 'ideological' - so often deployed for a blunt left-wing critique of the insidious 'hegemony' of bourgeois 'power structures' - is subjected to the scrutiny of precise historical and social contextualisation, thereby enhancing Quinn's focus on selected 'transnational engagements' facilitated by the translation and reception of poets across the Iron Curtain." --Jason Harding, Essays in Criticism "Instead of overestimating breaches, demarcation lines and guarded frontiers, Quinn traces all kinds of rhizomatic, oblique, isomorphic or mirroring connections, juxtaposing poetic programmes, practices and pursuits from the anglophone world with those from beyond the Iron Curtain. What emerges from this skilful survey is that the Cold War can be reconsidered as a literary machine that has acted as a prism refracting literary policies and aesthetic attitudes, and thus shaping the literatures from the period.... [strikes] a fine balance between authoritative criticisms of models of transnationalism, close reading of poetry's delicate movements across languages, and a fair examination of political dimensions lurking behind poetics oscillating between dissidence and compliance." --Grzegorz Czemiel, Explorations "Between Two Fires sets an example for the scholarship he solicits, as well as being a powerful demonstration of the need for contemporary criticism to move beyond anachronistic nationalism in order to understand the global context in which culture operates." --Aidan Watson-Morris, Transnational Literature "[Justin Quinn's] is a deliberately dissenting voice, and Between Two Fires a book that aspires to leaving a mark by combining well-honed scholarship in literary traditions less familiar to western readers with bold revisions of major poets of the English language. For the reasons sketched above, and more, Quinn's revisions are bound to raise eyebrows and prompt oppositional responses but they ensure that his book will never be received with indifference." --Rui Carvalho Homem, The Irish Review