36
PARTISAN REVIEW
There remain, with the exception of Michael Gold and Joseph Free–
man, (whose peculiar positions in American revolutionary poetry will
be
discussed later), seven American poets who are active, young, productive:
Horace Gregory, Kenneth Fearing, Isidor Schneider, Ben Maddow, S.
Funaroff, Alfred Hayes and Muriel Rukeyser.
Each of these
poets has, if not a solid body of published work, a number o.f poems
that are worth preserving for varied reasons. Gregory has
Chelsea Room–
ing House
(1930)
No R etreat
(1933) and
Chorus for Survival
(1935).
Kenneth Fearing has, in his poetry of the past two or three years by far
eclipsed his first performance in
Angel Arms
( 1929). lsidor Schneider
.tas published
The Temptatzon of Anthony
(1928) and
Comrade-Jltlister
(1935).
The youngest poets listed have each several poems which are note–
worthy. Ben Maddow has
R ed Decision
and
The Communist Party of
Germany,·
S. Funaroff has his contributions to
We Gather Strength
( 1933), as well as more recent, better developed work; Alfred Hayes has
In a Cojfee Pot, Undergrou11d
and
Smolny;
Muriel Rukeyser has her
book-poem,
Theory of Flight.
Among these younger poets-and it is they whose work I wish to
discuss primarily, various tendencies are to be observed. Some of these,
as I have said, promise much for the future of revolutionary poetry. Others
are dangerous.
Roughly, although all of these young men and women have broken
away from the slipshod, blatant verse of their predecessors, new signs of
danger have appeared in their work. These signs were to be expected.
While they are, possibly, some of the symptoms of the growing pains of
the new revolutionary poetry, they should be pointed out and warned
against lest they become irrevocably part of our poetry, to its decided harm.
But to point out these symptoms and the attendant dangers, we must
examine their origins.
In 1926 the utmost confusion existed in the world of revolutionary
literature. We young fledgling poets, who were in our 'teens then, read
the
Neu; Masus,
established that year. We read the
Daily Work er,
then
two years old, which had just moved to New York from Chicago. Some
of us took Michael Gold's "Writers' Workshop" class at the old Workers'
School on East Fourteenth Street.
We
studied journalism and had frag–
mentary talks with Joseph Freeman. Scarcely beyond high school age
(many of us still attended high school), we were at the stage where
we:
were still writing our adolescent poetry about friendship, nature, love.
Some of us were members of the Young Work.ers League and we partici–
pated desultorily in street-corner meetings and in small neighborhood de–
monstrations and strikes.
