Since its inception as a category of literary study during the 1930s, Modernism has been notoriously inhospitable to definition. Nowhere is this inhospitability more pronounced than in the fraught issue of the relations of art to politics. How does aesthetic activity categorized as modernist stand in relation to forms of power? And how to the experiential realities that constitute the charged political dimensions of social life? With respect to these questions, Anglo-American Modernism has been both celebrated and derided; it has been praised for its richness in negotiating historically new forms of experience, and it has equally been censured for a defensive fear and loathing of precisely those forms. To complicate matters even more, we find the makers of Modernism spread all over the political map of twentieth-century Western Europe, England, and America: running with Reds; making political broadcasts for Mussolini; militating against the Ku Klux Klan; arguing for free speech and free love as well as free verse. How are we, then, as latter-day readers, to evaluate the political meaning of Modernism, especially when we are taught that its most notable - indeed, perhaps only - unifying feature was the attempt to transcend the political altogether?