John Wheelwright, Radio, and the Sonnet’s New Deal
“Verse + Radio = Poetry.” So goes the formula that modernist poet, socialist agitator, and shortwave broadcaster John Wheelwright (1897-1940) proposed to describe the catalyzing significance of radio as an aesthetic and political proving ground for American poets at
midcentury—“the sternest and most refined test that poetry has ever undergone.” Wheelwright’s hyperbolic provocations have been lately echoed, albeit in more scrupulous terms, by media-minded scholars concerned to foreground the role of sound technologies in the development of Anglophone poetic modernism. This short paper wagers that the understudied Wheelwright has much to offer such media histories of the lyric, not only because the modernist poet himself engaged the literary and political possibilities of broadcast while operating his own poetry radio program in the late 1930s, but also because Wheelwright pursued his radio poetics while simultaneously engineering a wholesale renovation of that unlikeliest of radical modernist forms—the sonnet. In Wheelwright’s hands, the sonnet develops as a sonic medium in its own right, one which, like broadcast radio, can be calibrated to expressly revolutionary ends.
In attempting to conceive the Depression-era sonnet as a poetic technology in transformative negotiations with other more powerful speaking media, I will focus on two signally innovative collections from 1938: Wheelwright’s virtuosic Mirrors of Venus: A Novel in Sonnets; and M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets by Merrill Moore (1903-1957), the audaciously prolific psychiatrist who read poems on air with Wheelwright and whose vernacular stripping of the sonnet to its rhetorical studs converted no less an anti-sonneteer than William Carlos Williams to the form. Syncing a few close readings to the mediations of a New Deal soundscape, this paper will show how Wheelwright’s experiments with the sonnet’s sonorous materiality were driven by and oriented towards the social contradictions and emergent possibilities of the 1930s.
midcentury—“the sternest and most refined test that poetry has ever undergone.” Wheelwright’s hyperbolic provocations have been lately echoed, albeit in more scrupulous terms, by media-minded scholars concerned to foreground the role of sound technologies in the development of Anglophone poetic modernism. This short paper wagers that the understudied Wheelwright has much to offer such media histories of the lyric, not only because the modernist poet himself engaged the literary and political possibilities of broadcast while operating his own poetry radio program in the late 1930s, but also because Wheelwright pursued his radio poetics while simultaneously engineering a wholesale renovation of that unlikeliest of radical modernist forms—the sonnet. In Wheelwright’s hands, the sonnet develops as a sonic medium in its own right, one which, like broadcast radio, can be calibrated to expressly revolutionary ends.
In attempting to conceive the Depression-era sonnet as a poetic technology in transformative negotiations with other more powerful speaking media, I will focus on two signally innovative collections from 1938: Wheelwright’s virtuosic Mirrors of Venus: A Novel in Sonnets; and M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets by Merrill Moore (1903-1957), the audaciously prolific psychiatrist who read poems on air with Wheelwright and whose vernacular stripping of the sonnet to its rhetorical studs converted no less an anti-sonneteer than William Carlos Williams to the form. Syncing a few close readings to the mediations of a New Deal soundscape, this paper will show how Wheelwright’s experiments with the sonnet’s sonorous materiality were driven by and oriented towards the social contradictions and emergent possibilities of the 1930s.
In the academic year 2020-2021, Matthew Kilbane will hold the Joseph F. Martino Lectureship in Undergraduate Teaching at Cornell University, where he has recently completed his Ph.D. in English. His essays have appeared in PMLA and the Journal of Modern Literature, and poems in Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.