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The mosaic of Old Peking is complete. The Italian diplomat Daniele Vare struggled with the dilemma of cultural relativism during his postings in Peking. Vare wrote novels set during the Qing and Republican eras. One day, he dreamed up a dramatic incident. A Qing official remonstrates against the emperor's willingness to issue a decree for reform. The official submits a memorial protesting the contents of the decree. He is ignored. To persuade the Son of Heaven of the sincerity of his protest, the official mortally stabs himself in the courtyard of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. The great divide between Vare and his teacher is described. As Stanley Karnow once quipped to fellow foreign devil Dick Hughes, “the Far East is a university in which no degree is ever granted”.

This chapter provides an overview of methodological approaches used in the book and briefly introduces the culture and history of ancient Israel. The methodology is both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, and important to the study are verbal and nonverbal forms of cultural expression that feature portrayals of hair. Treatments of hair in African art provide an excellent model for the exploration of hair in ancient Near Eastern art, including works produced in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and ancient Israel. The contributions of anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and scholars of religion also frame the work, including Victor Turner’s observations about rites of passages, Gananath Obeyesekere’s emphasis on the emotional, personal, and psychological roots and dimensions of embodied symbols, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock’s examination of “the social body” and “the body politic.”

This chapter discusses the ethical implications of the choice made by Antigone in terms of loyalty to her family or loyalty to her polis. It does this through the prism of Jacques Derrida's ideas on responsibility and irresponsibility. For Derrida, to be responsible to one is of necessity to be irresponsible to the other, so the choice made by Antigone is a synecdoche of the ethical dilemma of all such choices. Examples are adduced in the chapter to underline this point: the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, the Northern Irish IRA hunger striker Francis Hughes, Robert McCartney, murdered by the IRA in Belfast.

The “jazz and poetry” combination was a short-lived phenomenon in the late 1950s which originated in the Bay area. Leonard Feather had this interesting idea of recording with Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes' works had a direct relationship with blues and jazz. The record comprised of two groups: a “traditional” ensemble which included trumpeter Red Allen, trombonist Vic Dickenson, and others; the other group was led by pianist Horace Parian and Jimmy Knepper.

Bishop John Hughes (1797-1864) was one of the staunchest defenders of the Catholicism since the beginning of his clerical career. In 1850, Presbyterian pastor Nicholas Murray (1802-61) exposed popery in a series of essays addressed as letters to the bishop. Hughes had ignored the pseudonymous author of these letters. However, when Murray was revealed as the author of the Kirwan letters, Hughes felt the need to respond and did so in Kirwan Unmasked.

This chapter explores how proletarian or revolutionary children's literature produced under the aegis of the Communist Party set precedents for popular children's literature produced in the 1940s and later by leftists. Building on models imported from the Soviet Union and Europe, as well as literature written early in the 20th century for Socialist Sunday Schools and often incorporating themes, principles, and aesthetics from progressive education, proletarian children's literature was limited in its audience because of its sectarian tone. However, it represents a conscious attempt to make children's literature part of a radical party program, and it often foregrounded scientific, historical, and anti-racist themes that would recur in later, more mainstream work by radicals. The chapter gives particular attention to the magazine of the Communist Young Pioneers, the New Pioneer, which published the work of several individuals who would later become writers or illustrators of popular books for children, among them Syd Hoff (writing here as A. Redfield), Helen Kay, Ben Appel, William Gropper, Myra Page, and Ernest Crichlow. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Popo and Fifina, Children of Haiti, by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, a book that was arguably proletarian in its subject matter but written for a popular audience.

This chapter examines the impact of McCarthyism on the production, content, and reception of children's literature, tracing a path from 1946 when the children's literature field seemed particularly receptive to books with social content, to the mid-1950s, when several authors (such as Meridel Le Sueur, Langston Hughes, Helen Kay, Howard Fast, Irving Adler, Leo Huberman, and Franklin Folsom) saw their books banned, were called before investigating committees such as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and/or became the subjects of lengthy FBI files. Likewise, publishers became more cautious about publishing books with controversial subject matter, including those with “interracial” themes. Despite these pressures, most leftists were able to continue working in the children's literature field, and found support among editors and publishers, as well as librarians (who were outspoken advocates of intellectual freedom). Moreover, public outcry against books by radical children's book authors was relatively rare, and even FBI files suggest that authors who were targeted for investigation attracted attention not for their books but because of other organizational activity.

This chapter examines challenges to McCarthyism that benefited leftists in the field of children's literature. Beginning with the establishment in the mid-1940s of Young World Books, a division of (the Communist) International Publishers devoted to publishing children's literature, this chapter argues that leftists made some of their most important inroads into the children's literature field at exactly the same moment that American culture became most constricted under the pressures of McCarthyism. Following the discussion of Young World, the chapter examines the politics surrounding Franklin Watts' publication of Langston Hughes' First Book of Negroes as well as the Kathy Martin nursing series for girls, written by Emma Gelders Sterne and Barbara Lindsay (under the name Josephine James), and published by Golden Books. It also looks at outlets for distributing children's books that were controlled by people sympathetic to the Left, including the Arrow Book Club and the Children's Book and Music Center in Los Angeles. Finally, it examines alliances that formed between writers and other influential people in the field, from the Writers' League to the more informal “Loose Enders”, who resisted the pressures of McCarthyism and pressed for “socially significant” children's literature.

Chapter 1 begins with the life of the Hughes family, first in Louisville, Kentucky and then in San Antonio, Texas, where the father (known as Russ) died in 1914. La Meri’s birth name was Russell Meriwether Hughes (the same as her father’s). It also covers the education of Russell and her sister Lilian Hughes (Newcomer) and their training and experiences in the arts. The last section tells of Russell’s travels with her mother Lily Belle Allen Hughes: to New York City (ca. September 1919 to March 1920), to their return there (ca. spring 1922), and then to their travels in Europe (ca. July to September 1922). Russel pursued academic or performing arts studies on each of these trips.

This brief epilogue summarizes the major conclusions of Left of Poetry and suggests how the book’s arguments might alter contemporary discourses about the intersection of poetry and left politics. The epilogue concludes with readings of Langston Hughes’s “Wait” and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars.”

This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent literature. This is the case even when later poets appear to differ greatly in their attitudes from Romantic poets. A case in point in Ted Hughes's ‘Skylarks’, which invites the reader to reconsider Shelley's ‘To a Skylark’ as both Neoplatonic and surprisingly realistic. It is argued that Hughes' poem enters its own poetic territory, yet it does so by virtue of its Romantic inheritance. More generally, it is suggested that post-Romantic responses to Romantic poetry allow us to understand how fraught and conflicted Romanticism is. Readings of poems by, among others, Donald Davie, Sidney Keyes, Denise Levertov, and Anthony Hecht conclude the first part of the introduction. The second part sets out in a more explicit way the book's purpose and method, including its stress on ‘aesthetic achievement’, its sense of the value of division, its sympathy with Albert Gelpi's reading of Modernism as post- rather than anti-Romantic, and its views of the work of previous critics who have written on legacies of Romanticism such as Harold Bloom. A brief chapter-by-chapter summary follows. Poems by such authors as Eliot, Yeats, Williams, Fisher, and Lowell are also mentioned.

This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict, or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets' marriage and to the intrusion of others' biographical speculation about that marriage. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with poetry of the 1960s and 1970s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems' artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored.

This chapter focuses on Learned Hand's career during the Depression. Nothing testifies more tellingly to Hand's growing renown during these years than his first genuine prospect of promotion to the nation's highest court: early in 1930, as he turned fifty-eight, he was seriously considered for a seat on the Supreme Court when Chief Justice William Howard Taft retired because of failing health. In selecting a new chief justice, President Hoover confronted a difficult choice: Should he name his close friend, fifty-seven-year-old associate justice Harlan Fiske Stone? Or were there stronger reasons to select Charles Evans Hughes, the sixty-eight-year-old elder statesman of the Republican party? Hoover chose Hughes, but only, it has been said, after he considered promoting Stone and filling the resulting vacancy with Learned Hand.

Coleridge's ideas retain their potency into the nineteenth century and beyond, though their initial popularity in promoting a ‘third force’ fuelled by the concurrence of imagination and heart, is undermined by the contemporary acceptance of Darwin's ideas. At a political level, on the other hand, the existential element in his ideas survives in the achievement of globally oriented ‘modern’ thinkers and writers such as Vaclav Havel. In the twentieth century, also, the implications of their vitalism are investigated by writers such as D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, followed by others, such as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who show particular concern at the loss of a shared mythology.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's main themes relating to the many different ways that Hollywood films represented passing between 1947 and 1960, thus casting light on the contradictory discourses about identity that coexisted in postwar American culture. The book has shown how Hollywood embraced the psychoanalytic turn and how representations of passing related to discourse about authenticity and identity went beyond issues of race or racial indeterminacy. Aliens passing as humans, communists passing as Americans, men passing as women and vice versa, or homosexuals passing as heterosexuals were all raised as possible scenarios that sparked a decade of anxiety and fear. The book has brought to the fore broader cultural anxieties about the instability and fragility of categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality—all of which were epitomized by Langston Hughes in his 1952 short story collection Laughing to Keep from Crying.