38
PARTIS.1N REVIEW
Both of these men did more in their different ways for revolutionary
literature in this country during those formative years than any others.
Talking, lecturing, teaching, writing, they kept their ideas and convictiOns
alive and growing when all others descended into bogs, were sidetracked,
or deserted. It was Joseph Freeman who finally showed some of us our
real direction, our real goal.
"You are revolutionists," he told us. "You need no better start
as
writers, as poets. As revolutionists you see the world of men and eventJ
in a certain light. When you read a newspaper story, you react in a certain
way. You react as Marxists. Now, the trouble with all of you so far
has been that whenever you have taken pen in hand you have forgotten the
most important and true perception and sensibility that you possess. You
have retained your personal sensitivity, but you have, consciously or un·
consciously, discarded your revolutionary sensitivity. This is disastrous
for you. It can result only in semi-integrated personalities, in poetry that
can never be true.
"Stop thinking of yourselves," he said, "as poets who are also revolu–
tionists or as revolutionists who are also poets. Remember that you are
refJolutiona.ry poets.
Then work hard at your poetry. The rest will
follow."
Freeman followed up this advice by showing a few of us his own large
volume of poems, a volume which, unfgrtunately, has never been published.
We saw, just as those who read his poems in
Partisan Review
and
Dy1UJ1Tio
saw, what he meant.
Not all of us owe so much directly to Joseph Freeman. Some of us
also trace much that is important in our poetry to Horace Gregory, for his
finely conceived, beautifully skilled work. We owe much of our zeal and
fire and conviction to Michael Gold's early poems. And, while the hour·
geois literary world seems to have already forgotten Malcolm Cowley's
admirable
Blue Juniata,
which the New Masses also completely muffed
early in 1929 (my review was considered too favorable, in those sectarian
days, to merit publication), many of us still treasure the poems for their
sincerity, their narrative of a quest from the farm-home, through school,
through exile after the World War, and back to America and a new
awareness of our times.
It was not long after we heard and understood Joseph Freeman's
words that revolutionary poetry began to emerge as a conscious art, well
on its path toward maturity. The old sectarian and resthetically bad verse
of the Rebel Poet magazine and yearbooks, while it was not dead, was at
least outshadowed by the appearance of a new, more solid, more resthetically
accomplished kind of poetry.
We Gather Strength,
which presented the
work of Herman Spector, Joseph Kalar, Edwin Rolfe and S. Funaroff,
