This chapter considers Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems in light of the various difficulties they pose to readers interested in thinking of them in formal and also in generic terms (however broadly construed). I suggest that each of them might be understood as individual attempts to resist intellectual, critical, and hermeneutic recourse to any such generalization per se. A salient feature of these “modernist” “American” “long poems” consists in a variable but tenacious schedule of negations: of literary conventions, of readerly expectations, of internal consistencies, and, ultimately, of any sense of an ending whatsoever. I reflect upon the implications of negation and excess when discussing “long poems” by three straight, white male poets, especially in a context as institutional as a Cambridge History.

This article examines the key biographies of Bertolt Brecht that have appeared since Brecht’s death in 1956, exploring the way that Cold War politics helped to determine how Brecht was seen in Germany and the English-speaking world.Whereas left-leaning and socialist biographers tended to admire and praise Brecht, anti-communist and anti-socialist biographers condemned him for his revolutionary politics and leftist commitments.The 1970s and 1980s witnessed renewed interest and admiration for Brecht even in the capitalist West; however, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990, renewed recriminations against communism and socialism led to further attacks on Brecht and his legacy, culminating in John Fuegi’s 1994 biography Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. In more recent times, however, ongoing problems with globalization and capitalism have led to a renewed appreciation for and heightened interest in Brecht, his life, and his works.