a boat somewheres but the seamen are piled up ten
deep on the wharf ...• So we thought we might as
well take in the inauguration and see how the fat
boys looked."
lVlary tried to get them to take some money but
they shook their heads and Gus said, "We didn't
come for a handout." They were just going when
George came in. He didn't seem any too pleased to
see them and began to lecture them on violence; if
the strikers hadn't threatened violence and allowed
themselves to be misled by a lot of Bolshevik agi-
tators, the men who were really negotiating a set-
tlement from the inside would have been able to
get them much better terms. "I won't argue with
you Mr. Barrow. I suppose you think Father Kaslick
was a red and that it was Fanny Sellers that bashed
in the head of a state trooper. An' then you say
you're on the side of the woikin' man."
"And George, even the Senate committee ad-
mitted that the violence was by the deputies and
Home Thoughts
from Abroad
PAUL ENGLE
MY NEW book of poems,
Break the Heart's
Anger,
*
is not, as my book,
American Song,
was,
solely about California,
Vienna, Chicago, New
York, the Great Steppes of Russia and the Great
Valley of the Mississippi. It's a book about places
I've been and things I've seen.
Some people reading it may wonder again why
modern poets talk about so many things they aren't
used to finding in poetry. I mean such things as men
and jobs and social problems. I don't mean skyscrap-
ers and machinery as romantic objects because they
have already been accepted in poetry. I am more in-
\ terested in the people who had the job of building
them, and in those who couldn't get the job. This
is not so remote from poetry as one may think, and
especially from American poetry, for the men who
have worked in America have been the people who
made our songs. In England, the history of the rail-
roads is just a chapter in the industrial revolution,
but with us it's a volume of songs. And there's no
reason why the biggest thing we are building today
-a society-shouldn't
also be written as song, even
though it is also being written up as politics in the
newspaper headlines.
The farm laborer that Wordsworth wrote about
• Reviewed by Genevieve Taggard on page 28 of this issue.
8
state troopers .•..
I saw it myself after all," said
Mary, flushing.
"Of course boys ....
I know what you're up
against ....
I hold no brief for the Steel Trust ....
But Mary, what I want to impress on these boys is
that the working man is often his own worst enemy
in these things."
"The woikin' man gets rooked whatever way you
look at it," said Gus, "and I don't know whether
it's his friends or his enemies does the worst rookin'.
.•. Well we got to git a move on."
"Boys, I'm sorry I've got so much pressin~ busi.
ness to do. I'd like to hear about your experiences.
Maybe some other time," said George settling down
at his desk.
As they left, Mary French followed them to the
door and whispered to Gus, "And what about Car-
negie Tech?" His eyes didn't seem so blue as they'd
seemed before he went to jail. "Well what about it?"
said Gus with a stiff unsmiling face and slammed the
groundglass door behind him.
was what ·he was because behind him were the En-
closure Acts. To understand the men and women
we write about today, we must also understand the
laws that have helped to shape them. We must be
interested in the Tennessee Valley Authority, be-
cause, whether it is a success or failure, the men it
will make or break will be the subject of our poems.
I feel certain that if Shelley were living in America
today he would be writing visions not of a new
Greece but of a new America.
I have been away from America three years, long
enough to find out what people over here are th.ink-
ing. I've found with surprise that ~ I?t of things
they're thinking are what we are thmkmg too.
In Vienna, in Berlin, in Paris I've talked to as
many people as I could. And they are worried about
the same things we're worried about. And it seems
to me, having seen them, that it is impossible today,
if a man have any pity, to write what used to be
called "pure poetry".
The English poets realise this. I have talked to
them, to W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen
Spender. They too feel the heartlessness and the
uncertainty of their lives. And they feel also that
never has there been between English and American
writers so great a unity. This unity is no mystery.
It's the same kind of disappointment; they are ask-
ing the same questions, however differently they may
answer them.
In America, many writers met last year at a con.
gress, with most other countries represented by del.
egates or by word. It may be the most important
thing that has happened in American writing for
years. It is a large unanimity of opinion, and t~at
opinion is one that lives in Europe too. An English
poet in Gloucestershire writes of the same hope as
MAY,
I
9 '36
