The Politics of Reverie in Olivia Ward Bush’s Driftwood

Abstract: In 1914, a Long Island-born writer named Olivia Ward Bush published a volume of poetry called Driftwood . The efficacy of art often comes under pressure during periods of political turmoil and change, and Bush’s post-Reconstruction era is no exception. Driftwood draws especially provocative parallels between the reverie that poetry encourages and the rhetoric of progress and uplift that characterized the incipient New Negro Movement. Decades before Langston Hughes questioned what happens to a dream deferred, Bush used her craft to explore when dreaming was inspiriting and when it was ineffectual. This essay argues that Driftwood demonstrates how supplying space for aesthetic expression and freeing the mind to range for its own sake can itself be politically generative.