POETRY
uprooted man of today-have a quieter, deeper, truer emotional ring:
"Tormented by the world and his desires,
He dreams upon the lips he kisses
And the dreams are lies .
"
41
The first quotation is from Hayes'
Underground,·
the second from
Charles Henry Newman's
Uprooted.
A more complete examination of
the two poems will further illustrate the difference between internal
emotional development of theme, and verbal pyrotechnics which, no matter
how brilliant, distract the reader's attention from the more emotionally
authentic sections of a deeply-felt and honestly-conceived poem.
Other faults of current revolutionary poetry, such as false, superim–
posed simplification, insufficient variety in verse-forms, and political rather
than poetic development of theme, should be mentioned. Each of these
faults deserves a complete essay for_itself. My purpose in mentioning
them is mainly to stimulate discussion among poets and critics of poetry,
as well as among interested readers. To treat them fully here would
extend this paper far beyond its practical limits. .
Let us assume, then, that poets, recognizing the falllts in their work
which have been alluded to in this discussion, will attempt to remedy
and to eliminate them. What course will revolutionary poetry in this
country follow in the future? A few pertinent suggestions are in order.
Firstly, it must be stressed that American poets have not yet begun
to express the real tang and intonation, the real idiom, of American
language. We have left unexplored the lives, habits and customs of our
own workingmen, as expressed not only in their ideology-or the ideology
of the most class conscious workers-but in their very speech. Who
among the American revolutionary poets has had the insight or the courage
to use the Ame(ican lingo as
C.
Day Lewis uses the British vernacular?
Who in America has written lines like
"As
for you, Bimbo, take off that false face I
You've ceased to be funny, you're in disgrace.
You can see the spy through that painted grin;
You may talk patriotic but you can't take us in."
What
I
am suggesting here has been proposed very frequently in the past,
but by the too-generalized slogan, "Go out among the masses." Yes, by
all means go out among the masses, but bring back from your contact with
them the results of your immersion in their activities and lives, their speech
and habits, the real stuff of poetry.
• This slogan, as well as many others, has a chanting, musical, poetic quatity
which could very easily be adapted to poetry.
