POETRY
37
But when we turned to the writing of revolutionary poetry, we had
nothing to guide us. We had, if we looked for it, Michael Gold's
A
Strange Funeral i11 Braddock;
we saw his
The Girl by the River
when
it appeared in the
New Masses,·
we could still buy Arturo Giovannitti's
drrows in the Gale
and the thoroughly inadequate little anthology,
Poems
for Workers,
at the Jimmie Higgins Bookshop on University Place. The
parents of some of us had belonged to the old Socialist Party before the
war and had joined the Communist Party upon its formation: we could
still find stray copies of the old
Masses
and
The Liberator
in our homes.
But Michael Gold and Joseph Freeman, the only two living poets
with whom we had occasional personal contact, could give us nothing
through their work. and very little through their talks. We were still too
young. Consequently we returned again and again to the age-old themes
of adolescence.
But the need for expresswn in verse of our activities and emotional
experiences in the revolutionary movement could not be stifled. We there–
fore began to put into verse form the speeches that we made or would have
made at street-corner meetings. Every poem was a call to action: an
exhortation to the reader to awake from his political lethargy and join
the class-conscious forces of the working class. Other poems described
accidents in shops, bemoaned the trials and miseries of long hours and slavish
conditions in the factories. It was, .in short, journalistic verse that we
wrote-serving the same purpose as a polemic, although far less effectively.
It was not literature.
Because we had no model, no effective teacher, we had to make our
way blindly, experimenting with a number of forms. All the great poetry
of world literature was
av~ilable,
all the great literary tradition of history,
but we could make n<i use of it. We forced it out of our consciousness
when we wrote our revolutionary verse. Our themes-our subject matter
-which should have been the most vital part of our poetry, remained static,
unconvincing. ·These themes became, in our hands, almost trite.
A
poem
about the death of one militant worker repeated what we had said about
another militant worker. A fatigued coal miner was no differe"t, in our
verse, from a fatigued needle trades worker; and this, strangeiy enough,
even though we ourselves had worked in clothing factories and had on
several occasions descended into the pits of mines.
We were up against a dead end and could advance no further. And we
were on the point of giving up: turning to fiction or turning to actual
organization (as Martin Russak and David Gordon, promising poets of
that time, did) when we began to see the idols of our adolescence-Joseph
Freeman and Michael Gold-no longer as idols, but, more maturely, as
teachers, comrades, companions, men.
