BOOKS
desire of millions, become more real than warmth and breath
and strength and bread.
61
Kenneth Fearing speaks wittily with a formal ingenuity that seldom
becomes mechanical or prolix, and rich specific allusiveness, topical and
popular, that has made comparison with Walt Whitman inevitable. On
the other hand there are no metrics, few memorable phrases or images, and
very little lyricism. But some of the tenderer passages have a very pro–
vocative ambiguity. Here is one from
Lullaby:
Is the night that wraps all the huts of the south and folds
the empty barns of the west,·
is the wind that fans the roadside fire,·
are the trees that line the country estates, tall as the
lynch trees, as straight, as black,·
is the moon that lights tlze mining towns, dim as tlze
light upon fen ement roofs, grey upon the hands at
the bars of M oab_it, cold as the bars of the Tombs.
Most' recent revolutionary poetry has shied away from beauty because
pleasure in beauty, particularly in its more traditional forms, has seemed
a kind of acceptance, or an escape from deeper significance. But Fearing by
his firm fusion of both elements has intensified both. The emotions that
give
hi~
rhetoric life spring as much from a vision of the good as from
indignation with present evil, although the two are not really separable.
It is heartening to see
~uch
passion coming into revolutionary literature
amiC:st the jargon of intellectualism and the child's prose of behaviourists.
A comparison with political eloquence of the French Revolution or the
equalitarian aud abolitioPist movements in our own early republic makes
most modern revolutionuy speech seem emotionally inadequate to the forres
behind it and the goal it announces. But of late there has been a broaden–
ing of rmphasis, a deeper consciousness of the powerful dialectic which these
poems
of
Kenneth Fearing so richly express, the dialectic both of hatred
and of love, love of life, of country, of the masses and the future they shall
create.
0BED
BROOKS
PROGRESS OR RETROGRESSION?
KNEEL TO THE RISING SUN and
Other Stories, By Erskine Cald–
well. Th e Viking Press.
$2.00.
Erskine Caldwell has become more certain of himself during the past
few years. The seventeen stories in his new volume are written with ease
of manner, and, in most cases, with surety of execution. O ccasionally, he
find s a theme important enough for his abilities at their best, and the result
is a remarkably moving tale like the title story of this collection or-even
better-Masses of Mm. Kneel to the Rising Sun,
a narrative of the events
leading up to a lynching, and of the lynching itself, deserves to be included
