The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene (Modernist Literature & Culture)
"Schulze is a shrewd and brilliant historian of American culture expressed through the poetic arts.  In this book she shows how the seemingly banal phrase 'getting back to nature' was really full of meaning and shadows, and how it stands right at the center of what we mean by modernity." --Donald Worster, author ofA Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir"InThe Degenerate Muse, Schulze provides a radically new understanding of early modernism, illuminating ways that scientific debates about nature in relation to national degeneracy, with its deep gender and racial biases, impacted the development of modernism, especially the policies of Monroe'sPoetrymagazine and the early poems of Pound and Moore."-Cristanne Miller, author ofReading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century"This brilliantly revisionary, meticulously researched, and elegantly written new book from one of the foremost scholars of American modernist poetry reveals the distinctly modern and modernist concerns of the Progressive era's Back to Nature movement.  Schulze gives us interdisciplinary work at its best, bridging the often vast divide between ecocritical and New Modernist approaches."-Mark Morrisson, author ofModern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory