Duncan White’s Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War is an excellent history on levels: English, Soviet, and American literature, history, and individual writers in a scholarly and accessible narrative covering roughly the 70 years of the Communist ascendency. Anyone with an interest, professional or personal, in the times and the personalities will find this a useful and enjoyable read.
Showing posts with label Duncan White. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duncan White. Show all posts
Monday, March 29, 2021
The War on Books - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The War on Books
The war on books, codified by Stalin’s functionaries
at the Soviet Writers’ Conference in 1934 and ruthlessly
waged by the secret police for the following fifty years,
was finally coming to an end, and Zhivago’s insurgent
guerrillas were winning.
-Duncan White, Cold Warriors:
Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold war
What books will America
purge this week -
What childhood adventures,
what scholarly works
What entertainments of an
idle hour
Will be forbidden to us in
this Land of the Free?
We pray that nations blessed
with liberty
Will smuggle books to us, stories
and poems
With innocent ideas that give
delight
And in their innocence
threaten tyrants
What books will America
purge this week –
And when did we become
afraid of ideas?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
