40
PARTISAN REVIEW
the clearer and more po.werful lens of the Marxist magnifying glass.
Another deplorable thing in the work of these younger poets is their
tendency toward formula-writing. However skilled the poetry may be, the
static conception always mars the poem. Simply, the formula is to describe
an event in verse, add a second part of interpretation (generally pseudo–
philosophical), and wind up with a third part which, instead of tying the
first two parts together as it is meant to do, introduces a prophecy or a
call to action, very often bombastic and in the barest, worst sense, didactic.
Such formula-writing, from which Maddow and Hayes have suffered, is
always ineffective.
Another danger in revolutionary verse is the tendency to slogan·
ize. Many of us recognized long ago that the use of slogans was entirely
valid in revolutionary poetry, but that this validity depended on two factors:
the slogan's meaning in actual life and struggle, and its integration with
the poem. Harry Alan Potamkin and
A. B.
Magi!, I believe,
were the first American poets who used widely-known, meaning–
ful slogans effectively in their verse. Others too have used them
to good advantage. So that now the only poets using workers'
slogans unintelligently in their verse are the very young ones
who are still grappling with the problems we solved several years ago.
But when I referred to the danger of sloganizing I meant not the use of
widely known slogans which are the property-almost the new folk-lore–
of an entire class, such as "Free Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro boys!"•
I meant, rather, the use of a startling, sloganized line, badly thought
through and used for its effect rather than for its truth, such. as Alfred
Hayes' closing line in
To Otto Bauer;
"They marched forth Social-Democrats but Bolsheviks
they died!"
Such a lim, describing the Austrian workers' February uprising, is not only
untrue, but it is too neat, too slick, too superficially plausible to do anything
except maJ an otherwise good poem.
In cc mection with Hayes' poems, another dan2:erous tendency m
current re olutionary verse occurs to me: the tendency to substitute super–
ficial excit !ment of word and phrase for the deeper, quieter intensity of
true emoti mal development. For example, the lines
"Under our quiet hat
The mind flames scarlet with a sudden heat,
We burn secretly and sweet ..."
seems to me to be verbal, superficial excitement, whereas the following
lines, essentially about the same figure-the young, brooding, w01kless,
