caa a22 4500 388048379 CHVBK 20180307125044.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199810 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0361233300006256 doi S0361233300006256 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0361233300006256 Blake David Haven Exile and the Republic: Thomas McGrath and the Legacy of Jefferson's America [Elektronische Daten] [David Haven Blake] Of the many authorities Thomas McGrath rejected during his life, one of the most significant was the American Revolution, for his work explicitly questions the founders as a source of aesthetic and political creativity. "The National Past has its houses,” he writes in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, "but their fires have long gone out!” From his pronouncing the death of Virginia's deified presidents to his condemnation of the "local colorist” hunting for patriotic "HEADwaters” by which to camp, the poet's renunciation of the "false Past” amounts to a coherent commentary on the relations between American politics and modernist poetry (Letter, 315). E. P. Thompson has remarked in paving homage to his friend that "McGrath is a poet of alienation . His trajectory has been that of willful defiance ... At every point when the applause - anyone's applause, even the applause of the alienated - seemed about to salute him, he has taken a jagged fork to a wilderness of his own making.” Although his language strongly recalls that of Emerson's "Self-Reliance,” Thompson views McGrath as more than a romantic individualist. McGrath's alienation was not simply the estrangement that Marx saw afflicting all of capitalist society, nor was it a momentarily fashionable pose; rather, it was a calculated and thorough opposition to what Thompson calls "official culture” and its destruction of political, historical, and literary values. McGrath's refusal to make a "usable past” out of the American Revolution participates in this general defiance of "official culture,” as his work insistently reminds us that among the regular patrons of Monticello and Mt. Vernon were the many establishment poets well entrenched in bourgeois universities. In defying modernism's efforts to renovate the 18th century, McGrath makes a wilderness of his own, a wilderness which grows in opposition to the wellplowed fields of American empire. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998 Prospects Cambridge University Press 23(1998-10), 23-38 0361-2333 23<23 1998 23 PTS https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300006256 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300006256 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Blake David Haven NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Prospects Cambridge University Press 23(1998-10), 23-38 0361-2333 23<23 1998 23 PTS CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge