On the afternoon of 28 June 1961, the former New Masses editor Joseph Freeman (1897–1965) lugubriously trudged over to the old red-brick Baptist-Congregationalist church on Washington Square South in New York City to attend the memorial service for the writer Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961), dead of lung cancer at age fifty-nine. The next day, Freeman mailed a seven-page report on the event to poet Horace Gregory (1898–1982), the friend and political associate of both Freeman and Fearing since the Depression era, when Fearing’s verse seemed a beacon for the cultural Left.1
The death of Fearing, the premier poet of the Communist cultural movement who turned maverick mystery writer, thirty-two years after the stock market crash of 1929, occurred at perhaps the nadir in the history of Left-wing poetry. Just five years earlier, the old Communist Literary Left, which had inspired and then disappointed all three men, was dealt a near-death blow by Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, coming in the wake of nearly a decade of Cold War witch hunting. The only poets of national reputation who called themselves large “C” Communists after that date were Walter Lowenfels (1897–1976) and Thomas McGrath (1916–1990). As Fearing died in 1961, a nascent New Left was birthing beneath the placid surface of U.S. society evidenced by the burgeoning civil rights demonstrations in the South and elements of “Beat” culture in the urban North and West. Within three or four years this new radicalism would burst forth as a powerful and transformative social and cultural force encompassing the Free Speech, anti—Vietnam War, Black Power, and Women’s Liberation movements.
Fearing, whose sensibilities were formed during the 1920s and who reached maturity in the 1930s, who lived on as a lonely Left-wing fighter on the cultural front in the 1940s and 1950s, and who anticipated New Left cultural and political attitudes in his Kafkaesque view of modern bureaucracy and neo-Luddite themes,2 died on the eve of the emergence of the New Left. Freeman, who was a genuine bridge from the old Masses (1911–17) to the New Masses (1926–48) until forced out of the Communist movement for alleged undisciplined behavior in 1939 to become a chastened but unrepentant “post-Communist,” succumbed to cancer four years later. Only Gregory, who in the early Depression published subtle and well-crafted volumes of revolutionary verse such Chelsea Rooming House (1930), No Retreat (1933), and Chorus for Survival (1935), lived into the era of the new radicalism, dying in poverty and near obscurity in 1982. Ironically, as a poet of the Left, Gregory had already given up the ghost four decades earlier, even before reports began to circulate of his red-baiting attacks on his pro-Communist colleague at Sarah Lawrence College, poet Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948), a harassment that many on the Left believed hastened her death due to complications of hypertension at the onset of the Cold War.3
Nevertheless, Joseph Freeman, consummate in the role he played during his last few years of forgiving almost all those who had earlier shunned him, both from the Left and the Right, wrote with an open heart to Gregory about Fearing’s memorial. Exuding that irrepressible and irresistible charm for which he was famous—Gregory would remember Freeman as “a wonderfully radiant human being”4—Freeman described himself to Gregory as modestly sitting alone in the last row under a high dome and beneath stained glass windows of the Romanesque Judson Memorial Church. Like an invisible recording angel, Freeman silently observed the Fearing mourners as they entered. Then, Freeman’s imagination began “to spin a funeral discourse of its own” as he conjured up a memory of the first time he met Fearing.
It was the summer of 1927. Floyd Dell (1887–1969), Freeman’s comrade from the original Masses and Liberator, had asked him for an introduction to several members of the “Younger Generation” so that Dell might use the resulting material for a novel in progress. The ever-accommodating Freeman organized a party and asked his sister, Ruth, and brother, Harry, to invite their friends.
Harry Freeman (1906–1978), a recent Cornell graduate embarking on a life-long career at TASS (the Soviet News Agency), brought Fearing, already known as a published poet, to the party at the East 16th Street Manhattan penthouse of Egmont Arens (1899–1966), the industrial designer and New Masses editor. Following introductions, Dell turned to Fearing and asked him to recite verse. To Dell, this was a traditional activity at radical literary parties in the 1920s. Indeed, only a few weeks earlier, Dell and Freeman had attended a party in Croton, New York, where they stood and performed together for two hours—Dell reciting Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Millay; Freeman declaiming Eliot, Pound, Cummings, and Yeats. But Fearing responded to Dell’s request with the profane groan, “O shit!” Then he stumbled into the kitchen for another slug of gin.
After an interlude, Freeman turned to Dell and said: “ ‘If you are going to do a novel about the Younger Generation you ought to give careful consideration to what Kenneth Fearing said.’ ‘O shit?’ ‘O shit,’ I said. ‘It’s the end of one era and the beginning of another.’ ” Freeman concluded his letter to Gregory with the observation, “[T]hat summer night, Kenneth had revealed the break with romanticism that was to mark not only his own poetry but the poetry of others in our time.”5
To what extent was it merely hyperbole for Freeman to assert that a rupture with romanticism marked the poetry rising to center stage among the 1930s generation? The “O shit!” response makes a good story, but one that scarcely proves that the advent of a new phase in Left poetry began with Fearing’s blunt refusal to carry on the performative tradition of public recitation. Such a decision may well have been idiosyncratic to the man and the moment.
It is one of the contentions of this book that Freeman misperceived the genuine character of Left poetic practice in his 1961 observation, just as twenty-five years earlier he unduly simplified his own “representative” trajectory toward Communism in his autobiography, An American Testament:
If I have ventured to recount certain personal experiences, it has been on the assumption that they might be of interest to those who want to know how an American writer, starting from one set of social, moral and literary values, may arrive at another; how he may develop from romanticism toward reality.6
The narrative of Left poets moving beyond romanticism on the road to “reality” may seem opportune to conveying the hands-on engagement of Marxist writers, especially motivated by the pressure of mutating historical conditions, and their efforts to embrace, and often immerse themselves in, working-class life, experiences, and battles. Yet it also bolsters conventional figurations of “Great Depression Literature,” “Proletarian Writers,” “Socialist Realism,” and other hackneyed images used to conflate the Literary Left into “The Thirties” as a rather dreary interlude; the effect can be to close off the Left from earlier and later decades, along with the more diversified cultural advances associated with the 1920s and 1940s. The literary term “realism,” more than “romanticism,” also appears merited by the direct language, colloquial (and sometimes dialect) speech, and antibourgeois themes of Left-wing poetic strophes. Yet these attributes are not specific to realism, having been traits of avant-garde and much romantic verse since the time of Rimbaud and Whitman.7 Moreover, if we turn from literary style to epistemology, the Communist Left’s “realism” in regard to the race and class inequalities of capitalism and the rise of fascism was offset by illusions in the Soviet Union and the future of the American working class that might most generously be designated as “romantic idealism.” One of the uncommon books about U.S. Communism that manages to humanize a sweep of actors is Vivian Gornick’s justly titled The Romance of American Communism (1977).
In more rigorously cultural terms, Freeman’s contention might seem persuasive in that Marxist poets customarily esteem but ultimately discard romanticism, due to the historic links between Marxism and the Enlightenment’s secularism, rationality grounded on empiricism, and convictions about material progress producing widening democratization. Moreover, the common kinship of the term “romantic” with the gothic, erotic, adventurous, and individualistic, along with romanticism’s cults of nature and of genius, do not resonate with the predominant practice of Marxist poets. Yet there are other significant strains within romanticism that seem appurtenant to the modern Left; in particular, romanticism’s mode of vision and imagination organized about the goal of a social utopia; the Wordsworthian demand for simplicity in language; the desire to regenerate humanity by returning to some essential qualities deformed by contemporary values and social organization; and specific styles such as the meditative voice of the romantic lyric. This last quality informs the three volumes of verse, published between 1933 and 1955, of the Communist poet Edwin Rolfe (born Solomon Fishman, 1909–1954), remembered by a friend decades later as “a Jewish replica of Keats.”8 If adapted to contemporary urban life, and tempered by the brutality of modern racism and fascism, the category of romanticism remains beneficial to apprehending the evolution of the Left tradition.
Nonetheless, despite Freeman’s hyperbole, there was legitimacy to his avowal that a cultural break or rupture was in progress between the 1920s and the early 1930s. The national and international political emergencies of the Depression era, combined with the dynamism of publications and organizations led by Communist Party members and sympathizers, did forge a unique cultural crucible that would mix older romantic and more recent modernist legacies in unprecedented ways. What ensued, in terms of appraising poetic practice on a particular as well as an accumulated basis, must be apprehended as the result of distinctive temperaments finding their subjects and forms in affiliation with an increasingly organized political movement—one that variously gained their confidence and became the repository for their hopes. The coalescence of a distinct Communist-led Left tradition in the pre—World War II years was demonstrated on the “policy” level in two definite stages documented by resolutions of writers’ groups and statements of Party leaders assigned to the cultural field.
First, there was the revolutionary, proletarian poetry retrospectively embraced as well as freshly produced in the early 1930s—poetry that seemed most befitting to the longing that one’s art might serve as a “weapon” in the “class struggle.” This phase was followed by the democratic and “people’s poetry” appearing under the aegis of the post-1935 Popular Front, then theorized as an instrument in the “anti-fascist struggle.”9 In poetic practice, of course, nothing quite so clearly bifurcated and monodimensional occurred. A substantial number of poets in the 1930s, mostly younger ones, produced verse amidst the contradictory terrain forged by their early education in conventional romantic poetry, their attraction to the new modernism, and by the competing emotional claims of the evolving Left-wing orientations. There is no doubt that writers who migrated to the Left in the early 1930s were amply alert to the 1935 policy change and not infrequently made accommodations; Rolfe, for example, after the Popular Front, voluntarily revised an earlier poem, “Cheliuskin,” concerning the Soviet polar expedition, so that the less sectarian phrase “socialist will” was exchanged for “Soviet will,” and “the people of Leningrad” replaced “the proletariat of Leningrad.”10 Conversely, all through the Popular Front a number of writers, especially those who felt most attached to the Party, persisted in demarcating their verse as “proletarian,” and Party publications continued to exercise the idiom as well.11
In both the early and late 1930s, the Party’s orientations, magazines, and institutions were as emancipating as they were constricting. They furnished a focus and theme, a potential audience and venues of publication for writers who might otherwise have gone unpublished, and a set of technical problems around which diverse individuals could hold discussions and debates. Yet such alignments could also be turned into cudgels with which to beat literary or political or even personal rivals who might be imputed with deviations. Some leading Communists even used the requisiteness of political commitment to suggest that literary work be abandoned, a view reflected by Party leader William Z. Foster in his correspondence with V. F. Calverton.12 Equally problematic is the origin of these priorities in political, rather than literary, strategies, strategies significantly generated by the Communist Party membership’s faith in the Soviet Union as the vanguard of freedom and justice.
The USSR connection was reinforced by the subject matter of certain poems (as in Rolfe’s “Cheliuskin”) and parallel campaigns in U.S. and Soviet publications against writing regarded as too “negative.” Thus an erroneous view took root outside Party circles that Left poetry was primarily driven by “foreign” ideology rather than, first of all, the complexity of a poet’s creative drive. Soviet critics certainly wrote long essays urging U.S. writers to cleave to priorities generated by international literary conferences organized under Comintern auspices; yet there were admitted contradictions in regard to national situations. One example is that Soviet literary officials abandoned the idea of “proletarian literature” after 1932 in favor of “socialist realism,” yet the latter doctrine presupposed a successful socialist revolution—hardly the state of affairs in countries to which Comintern policies were exported.13 Moreover, even if Soviet critics urged U.S. writers to dramatize the Stalinist version of Marxist eschatology, most indigenous pro-Communist poetry equally shared in the millenarian vision of a signal destiny for the United States characteristic of mainstream writers. The omnipresent obsession with discouraging allegedly “decadent” and “passive” writing appears to have generated independently from U.S. as well as Soviet sources.14
Furthermore, the impact of the Communist cultural tradition is more consequential than just a Depression “moment.” Writers drawn to the Communist Left exhibited impressive coherency, albeit with diverse strains that persevered over the years, the maturing of particular poets over decades, and the appearance of newer trends in the atmosphere of the postwar era. What was necessary for this coherency was that the poets perpetuate their general loyalties to the Left and persevere in publishing in collaborative journals and volumes. The tradition first forged in the early Depression vigorously endured during the World War II and the Cold War decades, and can be traced through a series of anthologies and special issues of journals that include We Gather Strength (1933), with an introduction by Michael Gold; Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology (1935), edited by Granville Hicks and others; the “Social Poets Number” of Poetry (May 1936), edited by Horace Gregory; American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers’ Project (1937); New Letters in America (1937), edited by Horace Gregory; Salud! Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain by American Writers, edited by Alan Calmer; Get Organized (1939), edited by Alan Calmer; This Generation (1939), edited by George K. Anderson and Eda Lou Walton; War Poems of the United Nations (1943), edited by Joy Davidman; Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944), edited by Thomas Yoseloff; and The Rosenbergs: Poems of the United States (1957), edited by Martha Millet. Surviving participants from this tradition who remained engaged with the Left—most famously, Walter Lowenfels, Aaron Kramer, Thomas McGrath, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes (despite his hiatus in the McCarthy era)—subsequently helped create the climate for the politically committed poetry of the 1960s. Lowenfels and Kramer expressly memorialized the tradition in their anthologies, The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest (1969) and On Freedom’s Side: An Anthology of American Poems of Protest (1972). But how did that tradition begin?
In the early 1930s, the literary organs, institutions, and circles associated with the Communist movement were aflame with a new kind of poetry that expressed a novel and extraordinary stage in the age-old aesthetic tension between the form and content of poetic communication. This intense, stimulating, and heterogeneous cultural conflagration was sparked by the atmosphere of crisis engendered by the depths of the first years of the Depression. As a result, writers whose sensibilities were formed simultaneously by the romantic traditions of the nineteenth century and the modernist experimentation of the 1920s were dramatically impelled to beget intensified moods of compassion, fear, and anger. These poets of dual sensibility—some embarking on their first publication, others a bit older and further along in their careers—wondered, as did the Bohemian-radical poet and playwright Alfred Kreymborg (1883–1966) in his “American Jeremiad” (1935), how the poet should respond when faced with mass suffering:
What shall a lover sing when half the land
Is driven cold and lives on dank despair?15
Others went even further in trying to reformulate not just “what” but “how” such a poem should be sung.
The proletarian version of the “American Jeremiad” that became the driving theme of much radical verse in the United States in the early 1930s, and which would create the foundation for mid-twentieth-century Left poetry, was forged by divergent pressures. On the one hand, poets felt the need to express the practical-utilitarian class consciousness that comes from making a commitment to an organized Marxist movement. On the other, they could not abandon entirely the semi-autonomous “craft consciousness” championed most recently by expatriates in the 1920s; such technical skill was still seen as crucial to the poetic process of reworking experience into stirring images, rhythms, and language. The end product was initially envisioned by political radicals of Freeman’s and Dell’s preceding generation as less a revolution in literary form or technique, and more the production of verse structurally similar to classics from Elizabethan to late romantic poetry. However, there emerged a post-1929 sentiment that the new poetry would be increasingly penned by workers and reflect working-class experience from a Marxist perspective, and would eventually produce “a Shakespeare in overalls.”16
Such a tension was implicit, but far less pronounced, in the first years of literary activity associated with Communism in the United States after it emerged from its illegal underground existence under the name “Workers Party” in 1922. Drawn to Communist literary circles at that time were poets of The Liberator such as Max Eastman (1883–1969), Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold (a pseudonym for Irwin Granich, 1893–1967), and the Caribbean-born Claude McKay (1890–1948), all of whom voted that year to affiliate the journal with the Workers Party. The riddle encountered in harnessing a literary project to a Marxist party—how to reconcile political commitment with poetic craft—would be cast and recast in the late 1920s, the post-1935 Popular Front years, the World War II period, and the Cold War era.
One of the most arresting and exhilarating features of the early post-1929 phase of the new radical poetry, inaugurated by the collision of the experimental impulses of the 1920s with the political urgency of the Depression, was the highly self-conscious, almost “theoretical,” quality of the resulting literary activity. Poets wrangled in meetings and in the pages of journals about their responsibilities regarding antiracist, pro-union, and antifascist struggles.17 Another conspicuous feature was the way in which the literary eruption of the Depression years engaged such a broad range of poets beyond the traditional elite poetry circles.
Compared with the non-Left literary circles—the Fugitives and the Algonquin Wits come to mind—the pro-Communist poets were drawn more markedly from different classes, ethnic groups, regions, traditions, and generations, and, to some extent, more equally from both genders. Most poets in the revolutionary milieu remained relatively conscious of their different cultures, even as they sought common ground in an overriding identity as partisans of the international proletariat. Nevertheless, there endured, implicitly as well as explicitly, an embryonic version of “identity politics” in their writings, often marking the poets not only by class but by gender, color, and ethnicity. These attainments are sufficient to link aspects of the early 1930s radical poetic tradition thematically and even stylistically with the 1960s upheavals in poetic themes and conventions that emerged among women poets and writers of color.18
Prior to the 1930s, modern poetry had been already developing for several decades in tandem with a socialist-inflected rebellion against the dehumanizing and inequitable features of U.S. capitalism. During and after World War I, writers advanced cultural and political dissidence through a variety of publications and causes (such as the defense of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti), and by gravitating to the Bohemian cultural ghettos of many cities, most notably New York City’s Greenwich Village.19 In the atmosphere of national crisis following the 1929 stock market crash, however, the organizational coherence, fierce utopian vision, and courageous militancy of the Communists in the United States proved unique in their ability to attract men and women of proven or developing literary talent to an extent never again replicated by any Left political organization.
The Communist movement, which had fewer than 20,000 members in the early Depression years, managed to telescope, crystallize, and articulate concerns felt by a far greater number of individuals, becoming for many an institutionalized conscience. The process, of course, was variegated, because Communist ideology and activism struck a chord among writers with diverse literary sensibilities who were at disparate stages in their careers. Conversely, implementation of the Communist Party’s organizational practices was sometimes shaped by the opinions expressed by writers drawn toward the Party’s institutions and activities. The poets felt obliged to make contributions through their writing, by collaborating on cultural projects, or, in a few instances, by abandoning poetry for full-time Party activities, as was the case for many years with Walter Lowenfels, George Oppen (1908–84), and A. B. Magil (b. 1905).
No single factor accounted for the writers being attracted by the Communist Party, although it was common at some point for a writer to come into personal contact with a charismatic advocate of Communist views, most often a Left-wing teacher, fellow student, coworker, relative, or effective public speaker. Between 1929 and 1935, when the Party was in its ultra-revolutionary “Third Period” phase, more than forty small literary publications and hundreds of writers showed demonstrable evidence of being attracted to Communist ideas and activities, but the manifestations of this sympathy within a coherent Left tradition followed no predictable schema in either the literary art produced by the writers or the subsequent course of their lives.20
Most noteworthy for the relationship between poetic form and content is that, coincident with the onslaught of unemployment and hunger during the Depression, the cultural activity surrounding the Communist movement was significantly informed by a wave of modernist sensibility and experimentalism that related to old traditions of romantic worker-poetry in complex ways. In particular, a dramatic increase in self-conscious technical innovation by Left poets rendered even more intricate the longstanding tension between the claims of practical politics and literary craft. Left poets and critics fell out along a spectrum as to their notions regarding the degree of difficulty permissible in socialist verse; they were equally diverse in their beliefs about the degree of proximity a poem’s content had to have to the exigencies of the class struggle. Then, as now, the conceptual problem of combining an experimental and difficult form with a non-elitist content remained a conundrum without general resolution.
It is not surprising, then, that from the zenith of the Communist Party’s cultural influence in the mid-1930s to the various stages of its demise in the post—World War II era, the Party-led cultural effort would episodically erupt in feuds and factions, sometimes resulting in the antagonizing of an individual writer and in a few instances small groups of writers. Usually disputes arose when writers objected to unfair political judgments made about their work.21 Moreover, while the Communist movement’s self-willed dependency on the Soviet Union for cultural as well as political leadership at times exacerbated the problem of developing appropriate forms for Marxist poetic expression, many of the attitudes precipitating disputes were indigenous to the cultural Left in the United States, and some issues were simply inherent in the very nature of literary practice. Hostility to difficult modern literature, for example, yoked certain Communist writers firmly to one of their arch political enemies, Max Eastman, who was Leon Trotsky’s U.S. translator.
When the Communist movement was founded in 1919, only two years after the Russian Revolution, the form of poetry favored by U.S. Left activists and political leaders was very much in the tradition of workers’ songs, ballads, and folk culture, partly homegrown and partly the product of class-conscious immigrant workers. This literary heritage distinguished turn-of-the-century socialist publications such as the Comrade, which featured poetry by Edwin Markham (1852–1940), Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930), and Horace Traubel (1858–1919).22 Before World War I, such styles and themes had been championed by worker-bards of the Industrial Workers of the World such as Ralph Chaplin (1888–1961), Arturo Giovannitti (1884–1959), and Joe Hill (1892–1915).23 In the first decade of the Communist Party’s activity, popular anthologies such as Poems of Justice (1929), edited by Thomas Curtis Clark, with a foreword by Zona Gale (1874–1938), and An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (1929), edited by Marcus Graham, a pseudonym for anarchist Shmuel Marcus, preserved this working-class literary legacy alongside more broadly radical poetry that often had been written by British romantics or Transcendentalists in the United States. It was also not exceptional for Left poets to appropriate the images and metrics of biblical passages and Christian hymns.24
Poetry published in the Communist movement’s Daily Worker, Young Worker, and Workers Monthly (which replaced The Liberator in 1924), was mostly in this vein. To some extent this orientation received official imprimatur when the Communist Party issued the volume Poems For Workers (1927), edited and introduced by Manuel Gomez. “Gomez” was a pseudonym for the Jewish Communist activist Charles Francis Phillips (1895–1989), who, despite his nom de plume (he also used “J. Ramirez” when he collaborated with Michael Gold on a 1923 Proletarian Song Book), was neither a Latino nor a Spaniard. He later became a Wall Street financier.25 In a flamboyant gesture, Gomez announced that his edition of worker-poetry was counterposed to all other such collections, including Upton Sinclair’s The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (1915). Gomez’s profession to originality was his belief that he had assembled the only volume in the English language truly written for the working class. In his preface there were no references to literary form, other than an implicit assumption that the language and style of the poetry must be accessible to his mental picture of the working-class audience to whom the poems were addressed. As for content, Gomez explained:
Workers will see in these poems an earnest [sic] of the invincible sweep, the elemental necessity, the suffering and heroism, the sacrifice and courage, the bitterness and devotion, the steady persistence, the already dawning triumph, of the class struggle of the proletarians of all nations for the overthrow of wage-slavery and the establishment of a new society.26
Despite the sentimentalized view of the class struggle, Gomez’s outlook is in the tradition of literary “utility” championed by Whitman—especially in Whitman’s non-hierarchical and democratic poetry of the open road, and his aspiration to create a public language demonstrating its power in public speech.
The zeal to promote working-class literature sprang from genuinely generous motives but also embodied a temptation to indulge in anti-intellectual, subjective, and partisan simplicities. On the generous side, the impulse to use art to draw attention to socioeconomic oppression usually produces poetry that tries to render clear and more concrete the relations of domination in society. The resulting themes are often premised on a belief in the persuasive power of poetry, which means that the poetry aims to inculcate readers with an understanding of class oppression, a sense of working-class solidarity, and an eagerness to fight for change. Poets may also try to commemorate events and delineate heroic figures with the purpose of creating a cultural memory and heritage distinct from what they perceive as a “dominant culture” that explicitly or implicitly ratifies the status quo and elides sites of effective struggle. A popular strategy is to use poetry to create images of the rulers and the ruled that can be counterpoised to those that appear in writing advanced by the governing class as well as by the mass-culture industry.27 Humor was also a serviceable stratagem for debunking the pretensions of elite culture; for a workshop at the Fourth American Writers’ Congress in 1941, twenty-one-year-old Martha Millet contributed “The Love Song of J. Anonymous Proletariat,” which had as its refrain: “About us people come and go / Talking of the C.I.O.”28
More troubling, however, is a familiar tendency of poets who align themselves with specific political movements to increasingly prioritize relatively narrow and sometimes immediate political objectives. They, along with influential political activists who take an interest in cultural affairs, understandably end up promoting a literature compatible with the politics and visions of these movements; in effect, the poets increasingly become the cultural “arm” of the political movement. But efforts to appraise cultural works in light of their degree of service to a political movement is complicated because interpretations of the entire range of possible meanings generated by a text vary considerably according to the subjective premises of the interpreter and the contexts in which works are received. Such ambiguity allows for bigoted and unfair complaints about the political intentions of verse, sometimes motivated by genuine misunderstanding but also by political fervor, rivalry, and even malice.
Moreover, poetic symbols and allusions are difficult to translate into precise political strategies. Even more vexing is the puzzle of conceiving and addressing working-class audiences. Those who work for a living are divided by ethnicity, color, region, class fraction, gender, and so many other elements of personal life that it is hard to achieve agreement about which vocabularies, allusions, metaphors, and other poetic devices would be most suitable to reach them. Moreover, whose experience can stand for a larger group or class? Should radical poets attempt to reproduce all cultural facets of the working class, including those antithetical to class consciousness and class unity; or should they emphasize only elements that the poets deem to be “in the objective interests” of the workers?
Edwin Rolfe agonized over this dilemma in “Catalogue of I,” a late poem in which he reworks themes from Whitman. He initially affirms that, as an artist, he transcends his own identity to speak for revolutionaries and the oppressed of all times and nations:
... I am the pilgrim of every race,
of every age, landing on every shore:
he of the slant eyes, blond hair black face ...
He thereupon adds the victims of war, but excludes “he who causes war or welcomes, profits by it.” The viewpoint seems categorical until a detached coda:
Who fears inclusion in this catalogue of I
Is useless, valueless, deserves to die.
Yet he, my doomed and unloved brother,
Is also I, is also I.29
While Rolfe never details in verse the behavior of those who, while not exploiters and profiteers, still fail to share his antiracism, internationalism, and class solidarity, he confesses a puzzlement that has haunted and to some degree compromised an important strain within Left culture.
Most often, efforts to appeal to the general category of “workers” prompted poets to selectively depict working-class culture by employing primarily radical elements aimed at a popular common-denominator choice of language and style. Accordingly, simplicity became a primary aesthetic criterion, especially among editors of daily and weekly publications of the movement.30 This is a stance much in contrast to the view, espoused most famously by poets such as Eliot but attractive to some Leftists as well, that poetry must be difficult if it is to perform its function in the modern world.
The Communist Party–sponsored Poems for Workers presented only literary forms that were conventional and rarely difficult. Fragmentation, discontinuous form, erudite allusions, word surprises, and other defamiliarization techniques of modernism are virtually absent. Still, the volume’s poems vary considerably in terms of direct and indirect methods of communicating meaning and emotion. It is likely that Gomez meant to suggest a tradition of working-class literature by his decision to open the collection with a poem by the Chartist leader Ernest Jones (1819–1869), “The Song of the Classes,” which begins:
We plough and sow—we’re so very, very low
That we delve in the dirty clay,
Till we bless the plain—with the golden grain,
And the vale with the fragrant hay.
Our place we know—we’re so very low.
’Tis down at the landlord’s feet:
We’re not too low—the bread to grow,
But too low the bread to eat.31
Jones’s poem presents the poet as the voice of the workers’ aspirations, putting class unity between the workers and the writer in the foreground (Jones himself was a barrister from an aristocratic family). The stanza’s political lesson corresponds to basic Marxist teachings: farm workers produce value, most of which is then expropriated by the landlord as the consequence of a perverted social order. Conventional religious and romantic associations are used to describe the plains as “blessed” and the products of nature as “golden” and “fragrant.” Social relations are depicted as an ignominious manmade system of domination, a distortion of what the natural order should be. As the poem progresses to subsequent stanzas, the refrain of those kept on the bottom, “we’re so very, very low,” becomes increasingly sardonic. The bitterness of the poet’s voice builds to an ironic climax at the point where the exploitative economic relations divulge their true political significance. The result is that the workers are mobilized to overthrow the monarchy but they are kept from enjoying the fruits of their rebellion.
“Caliban in the Coal Mines,” by Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977), offers a divergent approach, one befitting his reputation as a popular parodist and anthologist. Together with his wife, Jean Starr Untermeyer (1886–1970),32 he was often close to the Communist movement. Untermeyer was a member of the Communist-led John Reed Clubs, an endorser of the call for the 1939 American Writers’ Congress, and the chair of a session at the 1949 Communist-led “Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace” held at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City.33 As a result of these associations, he was fired as a panelist on the television show “What’s My Line” in the early 1950s.
The newspapers often referred to Untermeyer as “the millionaire poet,” not only because he seemed rather well fed, and was always neatly and tastefully attired, but also because he had inherited his father’s prosperous jewelry business. Moreover, with his acquiline nose and intense eyes peering through pince-nez glasses under a high forehead with hair brushed straight back, he always maintained a donnish demeanor.34 In poetry, though, he was a rebel against Victorian gentility, and a bit of a Luddite in response to the ills of industrialization. Parts of “Caliban in the Coal Mines” employ a gentle mockery as he toys with familiar cultural tropes and symbols:
God, we don’t like to complain—
We know that the mine is no lark—
But—there’s the pools from the rain;
But—there’s the cold and the dark.
God, You don’t know what it is—
You, in your well-lighted sky,
Watching the meteors whizz;
Warm, with the sun always by....35
Untermeyer’s tone is more suggestive of the playful verses of Emily Dickinson than the dirge-like drone of Ernest Jones’s lines. He also relies on popular references, such as the Job-like plea to God, and a borrowing from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where he refigures Caliban (a name intended by Shakespeare as an anagram for “cannibal”) into a symbol of the proletariat.
Moreover, Untermeyer’s attitude toward nature seems to invert the romantic tradition. The rain accumulates in the mine in dirty pools, and the atmosphere is cold and dark. Nature is only pleasant in the privileged world of God, for which Untermeyer employs adjectives that depict nature as a modern technological achievement to the advantage of the powerful: the benefits of a “well-lighted sky” provide a ringside seat to the entertainment of the whizzing meteors, during which time the sun serves as a heating device that warms God. While hardly modernist, the sensibility is mischievously modern.
“To France,” by the IWW poet and artist Ralph Chaplin, memorializes revolutionary history to create an archive of memory as well as a usable past. Chaplin’s first stanza invokes the Paris Commune as an inspiration and model for the coming class struggle:
Mother of revolutions, stern and sweet,
Thou of the red Commune’s heroic days;
Unsheathe thy sword, let thy pent lightning blaze
Until these new bastilles fall at thy feet.
Once more thy sons march down the ancient street
Led by pale men from silent Père la Chaise;
Once more La Carmagnole—La Marseillaise
Blend with the war drum’s quick and angry beat.36
Using a tightly controlled ABBAABBA rhyme scheme to reinvigorate images from the past, Chaplin fuses religious and revolutionary figures of speech. He conjures up a scene of rebellion in heroically biblical dimensions, establishing transcendent symbols of oppression (such as the Bastille of the 1789 French Revolution), and elevating revolutionary songs to mythic stature. The stanza that closes the poem identifies the Parisian Communards with Christ.
Another selection from Poems for Workers, Joseph Freeman’s “Slaves,” suffuses conventional rhyming quatrains with a modern perspective to dramatize the psychological consequences of the tyranny of industrial society:
Again the grinding of the iron gods,
The old familiar fury of the wheels;
Again the accustomed clamor of the rods,
The giddy belting, and the room that reels;
The dim light dancing, and the shadows shaking,
The little sudden pains, the mute despairs,
The patient and the weary hands; till, waking,
At dusk, we tumble down the crazy stairs.
Freeman does not lecture the reader about wage slavery’s similarity to chattel and ancient slavery; instead, suggestive synecdoche and claustrophobic atmosphere evoke the emotions one associates with alienated labor. Machinery becomes reified into brutal gods, while the workings of capitalism are likened to Sisyphean labor. The diminishment of nature (dim light, shaking shadows) combines with machinery to cause the workers’ physical and emotional debilitation, pain, and despair. The poem’s climax is a reverse epiphany with the worker “waking” at the end of day to stumble down the “shaky” old factory stairs additionally made “crazy” by the distortions wreaked upon the senses due to his exhaustion.
Poems for Workers probably represents the zenith of the indigenous working-class poetic tradition in the United States prior to the 1930s; the temptation to engage in proletarian didacticism evidenced here is mild compared to that found in the pages of the Communist journal Young Worker throughout the 1920s. “Clarity and Action” by S. Max Kitzes (dates unknown) is typical of the juvenilia published therein:
Clear your road through Education;
Fight the Night: its dread and fear.
Kill all Hate and Superstition;
Greet the Dawn with hope and cheer.
Dawn is Red. And so’s our Banner.
Rise Young Worker: main and might!
Close up the Ranks! Concert your Power!
And change your force and plute-planned plight.37
Other verses by aspiring young poets in the Communist movement bore titles such as “The Red Dawn,” “Song of Youth,” “Freedom,” and “Hail, Young Workers!”38 On occasion, established poets contributed in this vein to the Young Worker, such as Sara Bard Field (1882–1974) and John G. Neihardt (1881–1973).39 The latter’s “Cry of the Workers” begins:
Tremble before your chattels,
Lords of the scheme of things!
Fights of all earth’s battles
Ours is the might of kings!
Guided by seers and sages,
The world’s heart beat for a drum,
Snapping the chains of the ages,
Out of the night we come!40
Simultaneously, the Young Worker published short essays explicitly defending a functional approach to poetry. For example, “The Poetry of Revolution,” by Virgil Geddes (1897–1989), later famous for his taboo-breaking plays in the areas of incest and adultery such as Native Ground (1932), declared:
What we need is an immediate poetry, whose every word and song has been dictated by an unrestrained impulse, that is seeking the light of a new day in its cry for liberation. A poetry that is born out of the despair of our smoky and grimy existence, yet the ardour of which helps us to rise and escape momentarily from our predicament. And this verse should have a purpose, or rather, it should be sufficiently intentional and clearly inspired as to be an encouragement to surmount our present conditions by the vision of a new order. It should be like the joy of a streak of pure blue sky shining through, and apart from, the Depression of sooty smokestacks.41
This direct fusion of romanticism and proletarianism for didactic purposes, so prevalent in the 1920s, would remain a part of the Communist cultural tradition, especially in poetry of young activists, novice poets, worker-poets, and midwestern and southern regional poets. What is noteworthy is that there appear to be no references to Soviet cultural policy to justify such an orientation; the extreme, reductive utilitarianism sometimes decried as a “Stalinist” aberration of overpoliticized art had its own indigenous roots in U.S. radical culture.
Of course, there still remained in the 1920s the poetic tradition of Greenwich Village Bohemianism typified by the Masses and the early Liberator. This cultural milieu stood somewhat at arm’s length from Communist Party organs and institutions, and to some extent blended in with the liberal magazines of the pre- and post-WWI period.42 May Days: An Anthology of Verse from the Masses-Liberator, chosen and edited by Genevieve Taggard, was published in 1925, preserving much of the poetry featured in the publications. Taggard’s preface argued that the demise of the Liberator, successor to the New Masses that had been folded into the Party-sponsored Workers Monthly in 1924, brought to an end the coexistence between the free-wheeling Masses-Liberator tradition and the organized Communist movement:
[T]he Masses-Liberator spirit was gone—not so much dead as dispersed and divided. The magazine, until the war, was like a self-fertilizing tree. Social passion and creative beauty grew from the same branches. Now there had been pruning and grafting,—we have in consequence two trees—the air is sultry—there is no cross pollenizing. The artists who were attracted to the Masses for its art have gone one way; the revolutionists another. The two factions regard each other with hostility and suspicion. They consider themselves mutually exclusive and try their best to remain so.43
It is probable that the disunion of art and politics observed by Taggard in this passage expresses an exaggeration of trends and inclinations. Quite a few poets appear in both the Gomez and Taggard anthologies.
Besides, one year after publication of this volume, proletarian and Bohemian writers, including many of the original contributors to the Masses and Liberator, regrouped to create the New Masses in a spirit not so different, at least at the outset, from its predecessors. Correspondingly, throughout the 1920s the Modern Quarterly, under the editorship of V. F. Calverton (born George Goetz, 1900–1940), maintained a link between Communist Party politics, to which Calverton was sympathetic, and modern (especially Freudian) intellectual developments, recalling the original Masses.44 Moreover, modern-oriented publications of the 1920s such as the early volumes of The American Caravan included writers variously associated with the Communist Left. Finally, even though Mike Gold himself steered the New Masses aggressively toward worker-poets between 1928 and 1930, when he was voted into editorial power and some of his rivals departed, the broader Bohemian tradition reasserted itself in the magazine rather quickly after the formation of the Communist-led John Reed Clubs at about the same time.45
A survey of the plethora of independent Left and John Reed Club magazines that blossomed in the years just after the 1929 stock market crash shows a contentious marriage of proletarian didacticism with romantic and increasingly modernist modes and themes. Among those who wrote in styles close to the older, premodernist tradition were many contributors to The Rebel Poet (1931–32), the organ of a loose network of writers that united anarchists, socialists, and pro-Communists under its inspiring and apt banner, “Art for Humanity’s Sake.”46 The inaugural issue of The Rebel Poet carried an obituary of the expatriate-modernist Harry Crosby (1898–1929), who was among the charter members of the Rebel Poets Society and whose poetry was included in the society’s annual volumes Unrest 1929 and Unrest 1930. Jack Conroy (1899–1990), one of the editors, eulogized Crosby without reference to his literary experimentalism as “A rare and delicate spirit, his clear eyes unblinded by wealth, his Muse untarnished by the fool’s gold of commercialism.”47
More characteristic of The Rebel Poet were paeans to the imagined state of poetry in the Soviet Union, such as “Poetry and Revolution: A Study of Poetry in the U.S.S.R.,” by Morris Spiegel (dates unknown) and Ralph Cheyney (1897–1941), which declares: “the toilers’ poets stand by to inspire and strengthen the masses marching to the new dawn. They did not forsake the people in the critical moment of rebirth. A new poetic art looms on the Soviet frontier; its rays are already visible.”48 Mainly the magazine leaned toward the proletarian-didactic pole of the Left literary tradition. Editor Jack Conroy had no hesitation about dictating themes and moods, as in a rather feckless letter he sent to African American poet Sterling Brown: “The material we desire must, of course, deal with Negro proletarian life, and we’d rather see the Negro getting militant and willing to fight for his rights, than the traditional ‘spiritual’ and ‘blues’ type moaning that he’s unable to cross Jordan by himself.”49 The liveliest verse published by Conroy was probably the witty doggerel sort such as the rhymed couplets by Henry George Weiss (1898–1946), “To a Fat Bourgeois,” which begins:
O you are hog-fat and your clothing is fine.
So strike down your fodder and lap up your wine,
Let the paunch of your plenty protrude from your vest,
And the jowls of contentment fold down on your breast.
For we lean and hungry are supple and strong,
With thin lips that murmur, Not Long Now, Not Long.50
The vein is classic satire, lyrically mocking, comically polemical and moralistic in a standard verse form that recalls some of Stephen Crane’s stanzas. The Rebel Poet’s freshest contributions were stark, grim lines delineating class oppression and rebellion such as the opening descriptive verses of “Picket Lines on a Coal Mine,” by W. S. Stacy (dates unknown):
Gaunt faces and tense bodies
knit by hunger’s bond
into a solid chain
indissolvable—
weaves into a threatening lash
with a thousand smashing thongs
striking deep into the dark chambers
bringing up men to walk the earth
of a hundred coal towns.51
Here the techniques of imagism, especially non-ornamental diction devoted to clarity and compression, are deftly adapted to deliver poetry closer to the realities of place and the dynamics of class conflict.
Although worker-poetry of The Rebel Poet sort was most aggressively recommended by the Left mainly in the early 1930s, it endured as a constituent of the tradition thereafter. For the most part, during and after the Popular Front, it comprised a minor poetic stream, especially in northern urban centers. Yet even in official Communist publications, the prominence of such verse decreased as opportunities for attracting better-known and more influential poets increased, especially following the achievement of the 1932 Communist Party presidential election campaign in drawing to the Party an imposing array of intellectuals.52 Of the poems selected for inclusion in the Party’s 1935 collection Proletarian Literature in the United States, appearing at an odd juncture due to the announcement of the Popular Front that year,53 only a handful were clearly in the worker-poet vein. The most outstanding was “Papermill,” by Joseph Kalar (1906–1972). A worker in saw and lumber mills during his most prolific years, Kalar simply stopped publishing poetry at the time of the Popular Front.54 Two other worker-poets whose verse appeared in the volume, Jim Waters (dates unknown), who had been published earlier in Poems for Workers, and H. H. Lewis (1901–1985), also disappeared poetically after the Depression.55
In the poetry of one southern writer whose work appeared in the volume, however, the vitality of the worker-poet tradition continued for five decades. Donald Lee West (1906–92) was a Communist poet, ordained Christian minister in the Congregationalist church, and life-long labor activist who helped found the Highlander Folk School in the early 1930s and the Appalachian Folk Life Center in the 1950s.56 West was the eldest son of Scots-Irish sharecroppers, growing up in isolation between the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains. He was nurtured on the Southern Appalachian ballad form, and a view of Appalachia as a unique environment—one untainted by a history of slavery, and conducive to the spiritual qualities that abet a social-gospel interpretation of Christianity.
West attended a mountain missionary high school but was so provoked by a campus showing of the racist film Birth of a Nation (1915) that he organized a protest that brought about his expulsion. From there he enrolled in Lincoln Memorial University near Knoxville, Tennessee, where he took writing classes taught by a nonconformist professor named Harry Harrison Kroll. Thereupon he joined a literary circle with Kroll’s protégés, Jessie Stuart and James Still. Already showing signs of talent as a poet, West soon issued Crab-Grass (1929), comprised of dialect verse and rhymes of Appalachian origin. At one point West led a student strike against the disrespectful treatment of Appalachian culture at Lincoln, as well as the inferior food and facilities made available for students. West orated his militant speeches in the form of sermons. Expelled by the administration, he arranged to return and graduate in 1929.
West and his circle moved on to do graduate work at Vanderbilt University but soon parted ways when Stuart and Still inclined toward poet Donald Davidson and the Southern Agrarians. West, in contrast, fell under the spell of the social-gospel advocate Alva Taylor, who urged West to get involved in the 1929 Gastonia textile strike. There West met Ella Mae Wiggins, whose ballads fused radical politics with the native culture; it was at that time that West first cast eyes on real live Communists. He was further transfigured by the poverty, suffering, and violence—including the murder of Wiggins—that occurred during the strike. Soon West signed up to join the Socialist Party and then won a scholarship to Denmark to study the Danish Folk School system. He returned to collaborate with Myles Horton (1905–1990) in founding Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Unfortunately, these two men with strong egos were soon locked in conflict, with the result that West would depart after only a few years. In late 1933, following a trip by motorcycle to New York City to learn how he might help in defending the Scottsboro Boys, West attended Communist Party classes and became a formal member; a year later he studied at the Party’s national training school. Sometimes using the Party name “Jim Weaver,” and occasionally “Frank Shipman,” West returned to the South to serve as district and state Party organizer in diverse areas, including Georgia and Kentucky. For the next several decades he led a rough and tumble life, sporadically fleeing from vigilantes in the middle of the night, occasionally carrying a pistol for self-protection, and losing almost every job he managed to secure. Occasionally he won scholarships for graduate study at different institutions in the North, although he never finished the doctorate or the novel on which he worked for many years.
West’s poems appeared in the Daily Worker, Harlem Liberator and New Masses. His books include Between the Plow Handles (1932), Toil and Hunger (1940), Broadside to the Sun (1946) Clods of Southern Earth (1946), The Road Is Rocky (1951), and O Mountaineers! (1974). The publication in 1982 of a substantial collection of his work, In a Land of Plenty, convincingly presents West as a faithful expression of the worker-poet tradition of the early 1930s adapted to regional conditions. Furthermore, his assimilation of Marxism to his outlook of “Applied Christianity” —a designation that means the interpretation of scripture so as to recognize social and political realities—remained nearly seamless.
The images of simplicity and innocence promoted in Land of Plenty, inaugurated by the cover photo of West in his overalls looking like the salt of the earth, should not deceive one into missing the clever design of West’s project; the self-created aura recalls that of folksinger Woody Guthrie (1912–1967).57 Like Guthrie, West’s work aimed to modify consciousness by drawing upon many sources of the national and folk culture in the United States for the purpose of “Americanizing” the fundamentals of class struggle. In a 1943 correspondence with Langston Hughes, West affirms that he intends to reclaim the original meaning of the term “cracker,” which he insists refers to the first settlers of Georgia who were actually antislavery.58 The 1982 retrospective volume, In a Land of Plenty, also discloses West’s stratagem, during his fifty-year literary career, of dedicating himself to creating authentic working-class poetry as proto-socialist culture through the creation of myths about himself and a new history of his region.
From the statements on the first page—“No Grants” and “No Copyright” —the book defines itself as a countertext to anthologies of poetry that, by West’s implication, rather than by any direct labeling or strident accusation, appear to be “bourgeois” commodities. Moreover, the introductions to the various sections of Land of Plenty are not written by professional scholars but by workers who insist that their main qualification for writing the introductions is that they have dirty fingernails and calluses on their hands. The poem serving as a frontispiece, “In a Land of Plenty,” effectively conveys much of West’s method:
Up, up mountain toilers
And hear what I tell
In a land of plenty
There’s hunger and hell!
We dig and we shovel
We weave and we sweat
But when comes the harvest
It’s little we get ...
O this is the story
Of you and the rest
And if I am lying
My name’s not Don West.59
In his verse, West presents himself as a working-class version of the prophet of old, who comes to preach the truth about capitalism in biblical metaphors. He employs the national myth of a “Land of Plenty” without the sarcasm that one might expect from a radical. As a speaker, he identifies unconditionally with the poor and the oppressed. Turning to his intended audience, he embraces the manual worker of both genders—those who dig, and those who weave. Like them, he knows the exploited firsthand, and his job is to reveal the truth of their condition.
The last two lines of the poem, “And if I am lying / My name’s not Don West,” underscore the significant role of the promotion of his own self-made legend in his poetry. Various stanzas of his verse disclose that he is a mountain boy, six foot two inches tall, strong as an ox, and part Cherokee, who seems to have lived everywhere—the South, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, Europe. He also seems to have had every occupation: coal miner in Kentucky, deck hand on a Mississippi steamboat, sailor, school superintendent, radio commentator in Georgia, preacher, union organizer, farmer, and college professor. Moreover, he avows to have been a student at Vanderbilt University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Oglethorpe University, the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and several universities in Western Europe. Omitted, however, is mention of his service as a central leader of the Communist Party in the South.60 Moreover, he battled heroically against the odds—he fought the Klan, served in jail, suffered beatings from gun thugs, and experienced McCarthyite persecution.61
Besides creating a larger-than-life persona who blends a mountain man–Paul Bunyanesque figure with a working-class revolutionary, West’s poems also depict a mythological world of characters. Some of the inhabitants are genuine relatives such as Grandpa Kim Mulkey, a bitter foe of the Confederacy; West’s father, who died young from overwork; and West’s mother, who endured acute poverty. Fictitious, perhaps, are some of the victims of oppression and fighters against exploitation who most likely are composites or meant to typify workers in characteristic situations.62
Strategically, Don West as a poet is faced with some unique dilemmas. For example, he defines the role of the poet as the voice of the people, yet he cannot lose himself entirely to such a generalized abstraction. After all, the character of Don West is so crucial to his poems that he must retain some individuality in order to seem authentic. Yet by temperament, or perhaps because it might deflect his poetic-political objective, West feels he cannot indulge himself in individualism. Consequently, he offers just a few small glimpses of the private man, so as to convince us of his sincerity, while not crafting a full, detailed portrait of his personal plight. One of his most effective techniques is evidenced in the way he humanizes himself in the 1950s poem “Confession.” In lines exuding an excruciating anguish, he expresses his feelings of shame and guilt because, unlike Carl Braden (1914–1975), the redoubtable radical and civil rights activist jailed for his antiracist activities, West held back from speaking out and acting as defiantly as he wished, from fear of going to prison during the McCarthyite witch-hunt:
I saw him walk through
The prison gate
And heard the iron bars clang
Against his freedom.
Accused, character assassinated,
Condemned and forsaken
By those unfit his shoes to tie,
He went to serve time in prison,
And there, but for my cowardice,
Walked I
Walked I ... !63
The unnerving directness of the prose masks the text’s true function as a palimpsest, with layers of meaning gradually emerging as one meditates on the kinship between the two men, the nature of the unstated “crime,” and the ironic connection between the “criminal” and his persecutors.
At first, West might seem dated by his Old Left worldview, but there are strong elements in West’s verse that anticipate the themes of post-1960s radical cultural concerns. In particular, there are his emphasis on the hidden history of his region (specifically, his depiction of Appalachia as a colonized area that was actually a cradle of abolitionism), and his Liberation Theology portrayal of Christ as a working man and anticapitalist revolutionary. Yet West evinced some of the weaknesses of the worker-poet tradition. His simple lines frequently voice pieties susceptible to appropriation by all sorts of ideologies, such as his calls for honesty and decency. He also advances what might be construed as anti-intellectual literary values, as in his “Advice to the Would-Be Poets”:
If there is a thing to tell
Make it brief and write it plain,
Words were meant to shed a light,
Not to cover up again!64
In such sentiments, one can hardly find a more apposite challenge to modernism, and, indeed, to all difficult literature and complicated analysis. West exemplifies a prolific and popular activist-poet for whom both the earlier “proletarian” and later “people’s” poetic orientations came naturally. Yet he seems to have operated apart from any Communist Party–led writers groups and was relatively autonomous from Party-sponsored publications, in whose pages he infrequently appeared.65 Nevertheless, his particular populist version of romanticism was not the only variant extant among the Left literary milieu.
Several Left poets and poetry critics in the United States held sundry notions and theories about romanticism and modernism as interlinked stages in poetic development, less intricate and studied but not dissimilar from the fashion in which naturalism and modernism are complexly adjoined in Georg Lukács’s theoretical work on the novel.66 One such account, appraising modernism as to a large extent idealized romanticism, and accordingly philosophical idealism, was expressed by transient fellow traveler Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle (1931). Divergent opinions of these terms come to the fore in a three-way exchange about romanticism, Communism, and modernism that preoccupied the New Masses in mid- to late 1934. The discussion began with an essay on “Three English Radical Poets,” by New York University professor Edwin Berry Burgum (1894–1979), who would later lose his job as a victim of McCarthyism. Burgum attempted to map what is now called “The Auden School” of revolutionary poets in relation to both its counterparts in the United States and earlier poetic traditions.67
Burgum claims that the romantic poetic tradition, especially the work of Shelley, is the ultimate inspiration for the pro-Communist but modern-experimentalist “Auden School” in England, although Shelley’s philosophy is infused with a “less Platonic” conception of love by W. H. Auden (1907–1973), the fiction writer Christopher Isherwood (1904–86), and Stephen Spender (1909–1995), among others. Burgum additionally argues that the most politically and poetically advanced adherent of the Auden School is C. Day Lewis (1904–1972), for whom “Marxism is ... the next stage in the development of Rousseauism.” Burgum observed that, in his Communist-inspired masterwork, The Magnetic Mountain (1933), Day Lewis creates a symbol of “the classless society, the universal soviet that shall be the human race, towards which we are drawn by the irresistible flow of history as to a magnet under the co-operation of our own desire, the urge of our iron-like nature.” Day Lewis’s outlook is assessed by Burgum as nothing less than a voluntaristic break from positivist versions of Marxism. According to Burgum, Day Lewis is said to bid “his readers cease from their capitalistic delusions and follow frankly by what may seem an almost mad break with the past the course dictated by the virile demand for constructive activity and fraternal joy in action of what is to [Day] Lewis the undegenerated nature of man.” Burgum’s interpretation, with its romantic rejection of rational, linear progress in favor of a mystical flow leading to a breakthrough, somewhat anticipates aspects of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written later in the decade, at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.68
A few weeks after the appearance of Burgum’s essay in mid-1934, Genevieve Taggard, who once wrote that reading Keats in Hawaii sired her own poetic sensibility,69 contributed to the New Masses a provocative response called “Romanticism and Communism.”70 Her question to Burgum and the Auden School was direct: “Should the poetry about to be born belong to the Romantic Family? Should Shelley and Whitman and the ‘revolutionary’ Swinburne come to the christening?”
In an unusual move, the editors of the New Masses (presumably those who were the more literary ones, Stanley Burnshaw, Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, and Joshua Kunitz) appended a seventy-line response to the Taggard article, questioning her definition of romanticism. In their view, Taggard failed to make distinctions among trends within romanticism; in particular, she missed seeing the possibility of a “ ‘revolutionary romanticism’— a poem, story, or play projecting a vision of a socialist society: an outgrowth of the dialectical forces perceived in the present breakdown of capitalism.”
Moreover, while agreeing with Taggard that modernist art (the editors refer specifically to Dadaism, Stream of Consciousness, the Revolution of the Word, Objectivism, and Futurism) is certainly the final literary stage of bourgeois romanticism, and therefore a form of “literary suicide,” they see a potential ally in “the individualistic rebel—the bourgeois romantic,” who could embrace either revolution or reaction. Then, borrowing (without attribution) Trotsky’s argument articulated in his 1922 book Literature and Revolution, a source that it would have been impermissible for the editors to openly cite, they conclude: “In Italy the Futurists have gone with the Fascists; in the Soviet Union the Futurists became part of the proletarian revolution. The fate of the bourgeois romantic is fundamentally dependent on his historical milieu.”71
The argument here advances a number of parallels with topics pivotal to the recent effort of the Brazilian-born Marxist Michael Löwy to retheorize the relationship between Marxism and romanticism. Löwy locates, and identifies with, a sub-trend of “revolutionary romanticism” which means more or less the demand for a renaissance of precapitalist elements of social existence “worth conserving.”72 Löwy is entirely sympathetic to a notion of historical recuperation inspired by Walter Benjamin. In a 1981 essay, “Marxism and Utopian Vision,” Löwy’s characterization of social transformation also echoes Burgum’s description of Day Lewis’s appropriation of Shelley’s “mad break with the past”: “the revolution is not ‘progress,’ improving the established order.... It is a ‘messianic’ interruption of the course of history ... the emergency brake that brings to a stop the headlong rush of the train toward the abyss.”73 Revolutionary romanticism, then, is a plausible slant for divining those ingredients within Left cultural practice that are confederated to a universal vision and the total regeneration of the human race. Especially in light of Marxism’s repudiation of linear evolution in favor of a dialectical leap produced by social contradictions, it would be overhasty to theorize literary Communists chronologically as a modern extension of attenuated romantic intensities that followed the decline of the French Revolution. If they are to be judged romantics in any sense, the Left poets might be distinguished as returning to the revolutionary amplification of the romantic vision at its height.
Whatever formal ideological adherence to Stalinist-positivist versions of Marxism many Left-wing poets might have had, the tropes of romanticism, especially of a utopianism etched in preindustrial society, can be discerned even in the most modern of the Left writers. Throughout the writing of Horace Gregory in the 1930s, for example, one finds many archetypal features associated with revolutionary romanticism; both a “romantic hindsight” and “melancholic gaze” are brought to bear on an urban culture transformed by industrialization and market capitalism.74 What is uncommon in Gregory’s vision is the frequent invocation of both classical style and symbolism, as when he formulates his socialist utopia in contrast to the bourgeois world:
Wake here
Atlantis under hard blue skies
Thy Indian summer bride is like the spring
Roof-tree in light
Thy blossoming
In fire to love returns.75
Gregory, a skillful translator of Catullus, was perhaps best known in these years for his elegiac monologues, yet beneath the narrations of personal anguish was a consistent aspiration: to reconnect the Marxist dream of fraternity and equality with a romantic nostalgia often energized by precapitalist longings.
Most commonly, romanticism was visible in the endorsement of Walt Whitman, the poet most adulated by the Left. Whitman’s work embodies not only facets of classic romantic ideology but also a robust proletarianism, and perhaps even a proto-modernism indicated by his free verse catalogues and use of common speech.76 Taggard was exceptional in her questioning of Whitman’s rightful presence at the “christening” of a new revolutionary poetry. From the beginning to the denouement of the Communist cultural tradition, most Communist poets would in voke Whitman as a model. When Meridel Le Sueur published Annunciation in 1935, she was hailed in the New Masses as “something of a female Walt Whitman.”77 Even among African American poets, Langston Hughes was adamant that Whitman was “the greatest of American poets” and explained in a 1946 Communist Party edition of Whitman that his “I” was not “introspective” but “the cosmic ‘I’ of all peoples who seek freedom, decency, and dignity, friendship and equality between individuals and races all over the world.”78 Only the young and radical Robert Hayden (1913–1980) reproached Whitman for not recognizing the Black slaves who fought in the Civil War.79 But motifs from Whitman are revealed in the work of such a contradictory mélange of writers, including in the early proletarian poetry of African American Communist Richard Wright, the religious mysticism of Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972), and the Marxist-scientific modernism of Muriel Rukeyser, that it is difficult to generalize about the precise influence of Whitman.80 Perhaps the most striking manifestation of the Whitman cult can be found in the career of Mike Gold, for Gold’s trajectory is but a twentieth-century version of Whitman’s.
Both men spent their youths primarily surviving as moderately successful journalists known for their polemically sharp tongues, and both had a penchant for conventional romantic poetry (Whitman’s taste being far worse than Gold’s). In their salad days, both produced numerous mediocre poems and thin, somewhat affected, stories. In mid-life, both men—Whitman at age thirty-six and Gold at thirty—reinvented themselves before a substantial public audience as men of the people, voices of the democratic masses. For Whitman, who had been something of a dandy, the new persona was embodied in the engraving that appeared in Leaves of Grass (1855) in place of his name; here Whitman is pictured with a beard, a large hat, an open shirt collar showing his flannel underwear, and worker’s trousers.81 For Gold, whose individualism had led him from Greenwich Village Bohemia to Harvard Yard to Mexican oilfields, it was the literary portrait of the slum child of Jews without Money (1930); here his lower-middle-class businessman father was transformed into a house painter, and his radical younger brothers changed into a sister who was killed in the streets by a blond German wagon driver.
Both of these well-read writers would spend the rest of their lives insisting that they were not “literary” men, not college trained or products of genteel literary culture; when they spoke it was as instruments of the people. Among the clearest signs of this populism was the broad sentimentality both now professed toward home life and especially toward their angelic mothers.