Why is conceptualizing an American avant-garde particularly problematic? How productive is the term “avant-garde” for understanding the development of American modernism? As a concept, the “avant-garde” was defined almost entirely by theorists affiliated in various ways with the Frankfurt School using examples and with political expectations forged in western Europe. Various political and historical assumptions led to theories framing American modernist aesthetics as an impoverished variant of the European model. This chapter begins with a survey of some important theories of the avant-garde before considering the classic American modernist avant-garde – the years 1914–17 in Greenwich Village, New York City – as a case study, using poet William Carlos Williams as its touchstone. Evaluated from the perspective of European accounts, it suggests some limitations to the predominantly European framework of the avant-garde in illuminating American modernism with the example of another American poet: Hart Crane.

During Wallace Stevens’s lifetime, imperialism was already a global institution, but parsing Stevens’s relationship to imperialism was never an entirely transparent procedure. Siraganian’s chapter explores imperialism and colonialism through brief readings of some key poems, revealing how Stevens’s poetry investigates its relation to the competing imperial and colonial projects of his age. Throughout his poetic career, he closely followed geopolitical events, including Mussolini’s colonial invasion of Ethiopia, the invention of modern warfare, and the rise of totalitarian regimes. Various poems reflect this awareness. While Stevens’s views on the imperialist fantasies of his age were at times sympathetic, poems like “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Owl’s Clover,” “Life on a Battleship,” and “A Weak Mind in the Mountains” also provide alternative, more complicated accounts that question and sometimes oppose colonizing modes of cultural domination. Above all, imperialism, especially in its cultural variety, intrigued and worried Stevens as a particular variation on the question of knowledge that continually fascinated him. Contextualization of his poetry enables us to sort out Stevens’s competing allegiances at a chaotic historical moment: to anti-imperialism, to an embattled Western culture and ideology, to a unifying world of art and poetry.