Poetry, 1870-1930

POETRY, 1870–1930. In the era of printed literature’s greatest importance, poetry occupied a Left status and a popular readership that have steadily diminished since. The proliferation of the local press, in English and non-English languages, served an expanding radical audience, in many cases among a first literate generation. Poets occupied an important, sometimes central role in delivering the battle cry of the Left, mourning the tragedy of impoverishment and servitude and intoning the eternal song of freedom.

English-language American radical poetry had several distinct origins. From Philip Freneau to William Cullen Bryant to John Greenleaf Whittier, many poets have mixed democratic aspirations with melancholy, as if the highest political ideals were themselves transitory or unrealizable in American life. This sentiment found expression in the reform agitations of the 1830s–1850s, touched both by Utopian socialism and by a growing sense of dread. Militant women writers expressed themselves freely in a radical, “spiritualistic,” frequently antiracist vein. Some leading political figures, such as writer-agitator Elizabeth Oakes Smith, doubled as important popular poets. Indeed, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a major creative expression of the Civil War written by reformer Julia Ward Howe, can be seen foremost as a result of this ferment. Intimately related modes of versifying continued well into the early twentieth century, sometimes achieving form in woman’s right advocacy, sometimes in sentimental reflection on the sorrows of the oppressed, sometimes in bold anticipations of the “Good Time Coming” under socialism. Pro-woman suffrage publications, before and after the Civil War, offered space to poets conjuring woman’s role in the new, purified society ahead. Often, the various themes of gender-consciousness, individuation, and a spiritualistic (or proto-surrealist) anticipation of bourgeois standards overwhelmed were mixed together. Thus, the extraordinarily popular semi-radical poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox could write, against the background of urban unrest, of her own emotions as being “like Communists” who “hate king Reason for being Royal” and would “fire his castle and burn him there.”

A second current, at some points interrelated, stemmed from the venerable labor song-poem and the reformist currents of the English-speaking autodidact (generally skilled) laborer. From the early nineteenth century, in poetry written for music or for publication on special occasions, artisans had sought to distinguish themselves as a virtuous, hard-working, unique sector of American society, proud to be performing their tasks without aspiring to wealth or fame. During the rise of national unions and their presses, especially in the post–Civil War period, many more writers made themselves heard. Profoundly influenced by Robert Burns, Shelley, Byron, and Swinburne, they were also enthusiastic about popular poetry—such as “Man with a Hoe,” by Edwin Markham (himself an editor of Poe’s published works)—that expressed the endurance and bubbling rage of the downtrodden.

Some of these currents flowed directly into the English-language socialist movement of the 1890s. Hard-pressed to maintain their status in the recession, and increasingly convinced that their America had been stolen away, such poets turned to a millenarianism that crystallized around the image of railroad leader Eugene V. Debs. Six years later, even James Whitcomb Riley wrote verse for Debs’s first presidential campaign. And a “proletarian literature” of republican pride and dignity found its way into the far-flung socialist press. Meanwhile, many poets had rallied to the Bellamy nationalist movement. The New Nation and other Bellamyist periodicals published radical verse by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (collected in her contemporary volume In This Our World and used popularly by soapbox speakers for almost two generations), by Stuart Merrill (who was soon to become an important figure of Stéphane Mallarmé’s symbolist movement in France) and Voltairine de Cleyre, who by the turn of the century had become America’s best-known anarchist poet.

A third current can be found in Walt Whitman’s legacy of free expression, the vision of the open road and love unfettered by law. Whitman’s literary executor and for decades his chief publicist, Horace Traubel (1858–1919), was for many socialists and their sympathizers (including Traubel’s own intimate admirers, among them Don Marquis, Helen Keller, Jack London, and Debs himself) the apex of this inspiration.

Traubel’s Conservator, the premier socialist literary journal, 1890–1919, carried on the business of Whitman popularization through annual meetings and a steady stream of essays. It also sought to reconcile Whitman with William Morris, Debs, and the literary-political developments of the day as the completion of Whitman’s vision, “the singer ascendant beyond and become a prophet” voicing the “soul of the workman” as the key reconstructive force of the civilization. In Traubel’s own poetry, socialism (“the first glow of the earthly paradise which will yet be in the complete possession of man”) called out for fulfillment.

In the more popular socialist press, these three themes of sentimental-mystical reformism, republican virtue, and socialist predestination mixed willy-nilly. Some of the most beloved writers worked at the strictly agitational level with humor or pathos. H. M. Tichenor, a popular columnist for the National Rip-Saw (and editor of his own socialistic free-thought monthly, the Melting Pot) wrote an ironic brand of poetry without formal stanzas. Farther west, in the “red Oklahoma” where Socialist Party influence reached its highest national level, former Populist agitator Tad Cumbie wrote the well-circulated New Songs of Freedom for the socialist audiences to sing.

A fourth current, the poetry of the non-English Left, stood apart in many ways. Immigrant socialist and anarchist readers in German, Italian, Finnish and other languages mostly read the poets of their homeland, or sometimes translations of English and American poets considered sympathetic to the cause. Uniquely, the Yiddish poets arose with the mass Eastern European immigration of the 1890s, coinciding with the recession’s terrible effects upon immigrant workers and families. Poets addressed mass audiences in support of strikes or reached large numbers through the Yiddish press, or again, through choral adaptations of the poetry, a form carried on for over a century. David Edelshtot and Joseph Bovshover, read and idolized as singers of class struggle, stood next in generation to their elder, Morris Winchevsky, who himself practically invented the Yiddish socialist press and wrote poetry of all kinds, comical as well as agitational. Morris Rosenfeld was known as the “teardrop poet” because he captured the pain of the ghetto.

The poetry of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) struck a new note by its pointed indifference to work ethics, and by abandonment of the sentimental themes of simple virtue. Wobbly poets sounded the tone, in the lumber camps, hobo “jungles,” and agricultural fields, that the society that submerged its inhabitants deserved no respect or loyalty. Instead of the tearful laments and good-natured hopefulness of earlier craft-oriented labor poets, Wobblies sang defiantly of workers’ revenge in such apocalyptic lyrics as Covington Hall’s “Us Hoboes and Dreamers” and Ralph Chaplin’s “When the Leaves Come Out,” a paean to class war that Mary Marcy declared was the most popular poem ever published in the International Socialist Review.

Wobbly poets also reestablished the primacy of satirical verse, as in Richard Brazier’s devastating parody of the bourgeois-celebratory anthem of the World’s Fair, “Meet Me in St. Looie.” Often prefiguring what would later be called “black humor,” satire was also the hallmark of the Wobbly songs of Joe Hill and T-Bone Slim, as well as of Laura Tane’s verse portrayals of “women’s work.”

Arturo Giovannitti, one of the most renowned American poets of the day, editor of Il Proletario and agitator-hero of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, “Bread and Roses” strike, contributed his famous verse, “The Walker,” from his Massachusetts prison cell. (The IWW quickly and frequently thereafter issued it as a booklet.)

In the pages of the Masses, its successor the Liberator, and a handful of other semi-bohemian publications linked to radicalism, a new aesthetic began to take hold. Here, what passed for high-aesthetic poetry, always thought to possess transcendent powers, gained a new playfulness and (to a lesser degree) a modernist free-form. It acquired a dignity in and of its own sake, in the writings of a Claude McKay, Max Eastman, and John Reed.
Most noticeably, it took on a more strident, avowedly feminist eagerness for a female sexuality scarcely imagined in sentimental poetry. May Days, Genevieve Taggard’s 1925 anthology, marked by her perceptive introduction, best presents this aspect as well as the larger drift of radical poetry in the era.

The quasi-modernism of the “Chicago” or Midwestern School, and the intended realism of Carl Sandburg among others, proved the major final note for the English-language socialist poetry aesthetic. Successors to an older bohemianism, Chicago realists both iconoclastic and socialistic sought to confront the dirt, chaos, and rampant exploitation in the modern metropolis with unflinching collective self-recognition. Carl Sandburg, the most active socialist of the major poets, offered hymns to industrial reality, with occasional side-glances of sympathy toward radical opponents. The mordant poetry of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology bitterly criticized the smallness and hypocrisy of small-town midwestern life. Lyricist Vachel Lindsay’s “Why I Vote the Socialist Ticket” probably overstated his enthusiasm for socialism, but not his repugnance at American smugness or his veneration for the real American heroes (foremost, Lincoln) now turned into convenient symbols of reactionary ideals. More aggressively innovative expressions of a liberatory modernism—such as Mina Loy’s exuberant feminist futurism/dadaism, Samuel Greenberg’s Lower East Side surrealism, and Lew Sarrett’s wild evocations of the ecological consciousness of Native Americans—remained isolated from the broad Left, and found few followers in the classically oriented English-language literary milieu.

Disparate and inchoate as any fixed trend, socialist poetry disappeared almost as swiftly after 1920 as the publications that had made it available to great numbers of readers. Its main currents belonged to milieus vanishing from the center of American culture. Perhaps Genevieve Taggard’s final anthology, Long View (1942), best suggests how poorly this mode stood up to the treatment of such later themes as Russia, the Spanish Civil War, and the “Negro people.” Individual socialist poets continued to produce some excellent work—Lola Ridge is perhaps the brightest example from the 1920s—but rather as late blooms of a fading tradition than as bards of a living and growing movement. Thus, Marcus Graham’s outstanding 350-page Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (1929) proved to be a tribute to past glory, not a harbinger of things to come.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and the American Left: A Guide to Sources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.

Duffey, Bernard. The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters: A Critical History. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1956.

Karsner, David. Horace Traubel: His Life and Work. New York: Egmont H. Arens, 1919.

Madison, Charles. Yiddish Literature, Its Scope and Major Writers. New York: Frederick Unger, 1968.

Genevieve Taggard Papers, 1881-2001 Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library.