This chapter focuses on Charles Reznikoff’s 1934 version of his long poem Testimony, which consists almost entirely of collaged-together excerpts from nineteenth-century trial transcripts. The chapter proposes that Testimony utilizes these materials to suggest a link between past and present violence and social fragmentation, rejecting narratives of progress associated with the modern American nation and tacitly embracing the “debunking” imperative animating the work of interwar historians such as Caroline Ware. Reznikoff’s text is organized around the spectacle of the body in pain as a galvanizing scene within the modern public sphere, where public affect and social belonging were generated through collective acts of witnessing (and often perpetrating) violence and disaster. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the final subsection of Testimony, titled “Depression,” draws its subject matter from the aftermath of the “Depression” of 1873, as the text proposes this earlier period as a parallel to the crisis of the 1930s. In recalling this earlier period, the chapter claims further, Testimony proposes a negative vision of economic and technological modernity by revealing its human collateral, as well as the cyclical nature of modern social and economic crisis.

Chapter 2 traces the ways in which Stevens explores the autonomy and social function of poetry by constructing built environments and architectural archetypes. It discusses a wide range of poems from Ideas of Order and The Man with the Blue Guitar to highlight how Stevens engages in issues of poetry’s autonomy and its social function by means of making up places for poetry. His spatial formations operate with an impulse to project an independent aesthetic territory. Far from an instance of aesthetic indifference, the impulse to demarcate a separate space is motivated by a desire to envisage new forms of engagement with the period’s unsettling cultural and sociopolitical circumstances. The chapter teases out these forms of engagement in Stevens’ approach to the cultural debates over a “usable past,” his exploration of citizen-state relationship, his treatment of the poet’s fláneuresque connection to the city, and his vision of poetry’s relation to community.