SOURCE: Hartley, George. “Realism and Reification: The Poetics and Politics of Three Language Poets.” In Textual Politics and the Language Poets, pp. 53-75. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Hartley explores connections between the politics and poetics of three Language Poets—Ron Silliman, Steve McCaffery, and Bruce Andrews.

In the “Politics of Poetry” double issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (9/10 [October 1979] Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein published a forum on the views of various so-called Language poets on the politics of their writing. The common editorial procedure for that magazine was to publish related passages from the works of writers from other fields or times. Thus the editors included, without accompanying commentary, a passage from Terry Eagleton's review of Aesthetics and Politics, a collection of documents from the famous Brecht-Lukács debate on realism and modernism. Part of Eagleton's passage reads...