The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era is, despite disconcerting copyediting errors, blessedly well written. Moreover, American genteel and Georgian poets have not been much studied. Lisa Szefel’s examination of how Progressive Era poets and others linked what Vachel Lindsay called “the Gospel of Beauty” with “community, fairness, and democracy” should help fill this gap (pp. 3–4). While acknowledging a few earlier studies, such as John Tomsich’s A Genteel Endeavor (1971), Szefel’s book makes good use of newer work on the reading practices of diverse communities to discuss the period’s redefinitions of poetry as active, not escapist. Considering poetry’s reception, Szefel notes that “reception” is probably too passive a word for the strategies of the people she studies, who worked “to craft a new kind of moral agency” in readers, emphasizing the importance of “structures of feeling” more than ideology (p. 10). Five chapters focus centrally on individuals: Edwin Markham (the author of “The Man with the Hoe” [1898] and the first honorary president of the Poetry Society of America); George Sylvester Viereck (the founder of the Poetry Society of America); Harriet Monroe (the founding editor of Poetry); William Stanley Braithwaite (best known as an anthologist); and Amy Lowell (a poet, anthologist, and, according to T. S. Eliot, a “demon saleswoman” [p. 163

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