REVOLUTIONARY MEMORY is the most important book ever published about the vital tradition of left-wing American poetry. Cary Nelson demonstrates that when we recover these revolutionary memories everything changes -- our sense of the present and future as well as our image of the past. Making a forceful case for political poetry as poetry, Nelson brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canon's edge.With its particular attention to 'the red decade' of the 1930s, REVOLUTIONARY MEMORY revitalizes biographical and historical criticism for writers on the margin. Cary Nelson also shows us for the first time how progressive poets are best considered in concert, by fusing their work into a powerful chorus of political voices. This way of reading literature and social history will have profound implications for all future studies of politics in the arts.Illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, REVOLUTIONARY MEMORY opens a window onto an important and overlooked chapter in American culture.