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PARTISAN REVIEW
world that is dying and the one that is, in our time, coming to birth.
We are, and must
be
in the deepest sense, internationalists and revolu–
tionaries; not only politically, but (what is more important to us as
poets
and to the future of poetry) in our work.
We will disregard boundaries, and not permit our love for our land
to blind us to the position of the human beings who live in it. \Ve will
claim all that is worth salvaging in the American tradition of struggle,
revolt, progress. We will claim everything that is vital in the culture
of the ages. Our symbolic and heroic figures will be those of the
~en
whose
lives signify advance from one period to another in the history of progres·
sive human thought and achievement, in the history of the class struggle.
Men like Spartacus, Galileo, Karl Marx, Lenin, have meaning for us and
our work. They are our most deeply felt, most perfectly realized ancestors.
Some of us have already used these figures in our work. Thus:
"Look up from the book I
She is not a paper-minded concept.
She conceives hugely.
She makes the future. -
Look!
There is Karl Marx.
This is your Spring.
There is such a woman."
( S. Funaroff:
A Love Poem About Spring)
"His dialectic enervates the doomed,
inspires the mass to courage: not for long
can our foes delay our unfolding destiny.
Witness the death which he forc;saw, the seed
springing to flower, flinging its color, its breath
into the long-patient channels of our need–
silent no longer! Now, fifty years since his days
met their last midnight, we his countless heirs
rise dauntless in all lands, his wisdom in our brain,
the added lessons of half a century,
to impregnate the earth with newer life, to win
the final battle; and, classless, to assume
the final right to our suprem;lcy."
(Edwin Rolfe:
Homage to Karl Marx)
