Radical Poetry, 1930s-1960s

RADICAL POETRY, 1930s–1960s. Radical poetry associated with the organized Left during the first years of the Great Depression developed logically from predecessor efforts by diverse proletarian and left-wing bohemian writers. Several of the most influential Marxist-oriented poets of the 1930s can be found in publications of the 1920s such as the annual The American Caravan, the journal Blues, May-Days (1925), Poems of Justice (1929), and An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (1929).

The Great Depression’s national and international political crises, combined with the dynamism of Communist Party-led publications and organizations, produced a unique cultural stamp. This was evidenced, first, in the revolutionary, proletarian poetry retrospectively embraced as well as freshly produced in the early 1930s, and, later, in the democratic and antifascist verse appearing under the auspices of the post-1935 Popular Front. Writers drawn to the organized Left exhibited significant coherency even with diverse strains, the maturing of particular poets, and the appearance of newer trends, as long as they maintained their general socialist loyalties and continued to publish.

One element feeding into the creation of the Depression poetry tradition was the genre of workers’ songs, ballads, and folk-culture. Romantic elements were often quite pronounced in this writing, some strains of which were native to the United States and others imported by class-conscious European immigrants. The first poetry in the Communist movement’s Daily Worker and Young Worker was often in this vein, published with titles such as “The Red Dawn,” “Song of Youth,” “Freedom,” and “Hail, Young Workers!” In 1927, a volume published by the Daily Worker called Poems for Workers gave a kind of semiofficial imprimatur to this approach.

This selection by Manuel Gómez (a Party name for Charles Francis Phillips, 1895–1989) presents mainly styles that are conventional and rarely difficult. Techniques of modernism, such as extreme fragmentation, dramatic word-surprises, and de-familiarization, are absent. Poets chosen by Gómez range from Ernest Jones (1819–1869), a Chartist leader, to Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977), a veteran radical from the days of the original Masses magazine, who supported himself as a jeweler and who later edited a number of influential poetry anthologies.

The numerous little magazines that blossomed in the years just after the stock market crash, many of which were associated with the Communist-led John Reed Clubs, show a greater tendency not only to blend proletarian didacticism with more sophisticated romantic motifs but also to increasingly acknowledge the presence of modernist modes and themes. The Rebel Poet (1931–1932), for example, organ of a loose network of writers that united anarchists, socialists, and pro-Communists under the banner “Art for Humanity’s Sake,” carried an obituary for the modernist expatriate suicide Harry Crosby (1898–1929) and included his work in the Rebel Poets Society’s annual volumes, Unrest 1929 and Unrest 1930. On the other hand, more typical of the journal’s publications were the witty doggerel verses by Communist Henry George Weiss (1898–1946).

In Communist Party circles, especially in New York, the influence of Michael Gold (born Itzok Isaac Granich; 1893–1967); was paramount. His 1924 poem “The Strange Funeral in Braddock” was frequently read, reprinted, and even set to different kinds of music in the early 1930s. A haunting work replete with macabre imagery, Gold’s poem resembles a folk tale with medieval elements: dragons and ogres represent industrialism. Other poems by Gold are noteworthy for startling phrases such as “Poetry is the cruelist bunk” and “Hear the shriek of the killer babbitts” in his “Ode to Walt Whitman” (1935).

Gold used his influence on the New Masses to publish worker-poets wherever possible, although he was not sectarian toward middle-class fellow-travelers. Occasionally Gold even promoted writers stylistically close to modernism. One of these was Herman Spector (1905–1959), whom Gold declared in 1933 to be the “raw material of New York Communism.” Spector’s “Nightowl” (1928) and “Night in New York” (1928) are rather tortured responses to T. S. Eliot.

Although Spector stopped publishing in the mid-1930s and eventually became a cabdriver, Bud Johns and Judith S. Clancy (Spector’s daughter) assembled a remarkable collection of his work that was published in 1977 as Bastard in the Ragged Suit: Writings of, with Drawings by, Herman Spector.

Sol Funaroff (1911–1942), a somewhat younger Communist associated with Spector, presented a more direct, revolutionary “answer” to Eliot in “What the Thunder Said” (1932), in which he reproduces the speech of a revolutionary Russian worker to a crowd of other workers while a thunderstorm threatens. In 1938 Funaroff explained in Poetry magazine that modernist techniques allowed him “to form a dialectic image pattern which would enable me to present simultaneously sensuous, historical and philosophical relations within the poem.” Funaroff, who sometimes used the names Charles Henry Newman, Stephen Foster, and Sil Vnarov, was the guiding spirit of the literary magazine Dynamo (1934–1936). The journal’s manifesto declared that “the new generation of American poets is now ready to initiate a new ‘renaissance’ which in compact images and rhythms of poetry can utter the deeper, social and class meanings of the turbulent days around us.” Funaroff’s own collections are The Spider and the Clock (1938) and Exile from a Future Time: Posthumous Poems of Sol Funaroff (1943).

In 1933 Funaroff appeared with Spector and two other poets in We Gather Strength, the first of a series of landmark volumes that helped define the poetic tradition of the organized Left. The contributor who turned out to be most enduring is Edwin Rolfe (born Solomon Fishman; 1909–1954), whose Collected Poems inaugurated the University of Illinois “American Poetry Recovery Series” in 1993 under the editorship of Cary Nelson.

Rolfe’s critical statements tended to be functionalist politically. But his poetry often blended complexly a romanticism in the vein of Shelley and Whitman with a modernism lightly suggestive of Crane and Eliot, all mixed lyrically into the retelling of the events of his own life as a committed activist in the Communist Party and the International Brigades in Spain. To My Contemporaries appeared in 1936, First Love in 1951, and Permit Me Refuge in 1955.

The fourth poet in We Gather Strength was Joseph Kalar (1906–1972). A worker in saw and lumber mills during his most prolific years, Kalar, like Spector, ceased publishing at the time of the Popular Front. His work was collected and published by his son, in the volume Joseph A. Kalar: Poet of Protest (1985).

Kalar’s “Papermill” was just one of nearly sixty remarkable poems anthologized in a second and much larger landmark volume, the influential Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology, issued by the Communist Party’s International Publishers in 1935. Other than Kalar and Jim Waters, an obscure worker-poet friend of Gold with a past in the Industrial Workers of the World, very few contributors could boast a proletarian background or occupation. Whatever some self-styled proletarian critics may have declaimed in their theories, proletarian poetry in practice meant literature compatible with the Marxist outlook and political orientation of the Communist movement.

The styles and sensibilities of several older contributors to the volume, like Gold, Maxwell Bodenheim (1893–1954), Orrick Johns (1887–1946), Alfred Kreymborg (1883–1966), and Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948), were largely formed before the Depression, but, in each case, the commitment to Communism was substantial. Gold, Taggard, and Kreymborg retained their revolutionary political outlook until their deaths. However, the alcoholic Bodenheim became focused on the struggle for economic survival in the years before he was murdered during the McCarthy era, and Johns evolved away from the Left before committing suicide at age fifty-nine.

Most contributors to Proletarian Literature were more or less at the start of their careers, but several were somewhat advanced in publishing. Horace Gregory (1898–1982) had already published Chelsea Rooming House (1930), A Wreath for Margery (1933), and No Retreat (1933). He soon published Chorus for Survival (1935) under the inspiration of the Left as well, but, by the end of the 1930s, he was by stages evolving into a bitter anti-Communist.

Also more established was Isidor Schneider (1896–1977), who published a volume of modern verse, The Temptation of Anthony and Other Poems, in 1928, and a Marxist collection, Comrade: Mister, in 1934. While Schneider continued to publish poems in the Communist press, he became better known for his radical novels From the Kingdom of Necessity (1935) and The Judas Time (1947), as well for as his prolific literary criticism in the New Masses. In the late 1940s he became discouraged with the literary Left, thereafter pursuing a private career of reading manuscripts and editing for publishers.

Stanley Burnshaw (b. 1906), a New Masses editor from 1933 to 1936 and a non-Party communist, had earlier published several privately-printed volumes of verse and a critical study, André Spire and His Poetry: Two Essays and Forty Translations (1933). His most impressive anticapitalist poems would appear in the 1936 collection The Iron Land: A Narrative, marked by a structural strategy of rhetorical questions and innovations. Shortly afterwards Burnshaw launched his own publishing house, the Dryden Press, remaining an armchair leftist. By the time he began writing again, in the mid-1940s, he was becoming disenchanted with Communism.

Norman Macleod (1906–1985), a revolutionary imagist from the West, published Horizons of Death in 1934 and would issue Thanksgiving before November in 1936. He was also an active editor of little magazines, including The Morada (1929–1930) and Front (1930–1931).

Robert Gessner (1907–1968), already the author of two books about Native American Indians, a nonfiction work called Massacre (1931) and the novel Broken Arrow (1933), published a thirty-page paean to international revolution called Upsurge (1933). Although he episodically contributed poems to the New Masses throughout the 1930s, Gessner turned increasingly to fiction and then launched a successful career in film studies at New York University.

Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961), author of Angel Arms (1929) and Poems (1935), was widely regarded as the outstanding revolutionary poet of his generation. In 1938, he published Dead Reckoning, and his first novel, The Hospital, a year later. He terminated his associations with the Communist movement at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, thereafter promulgating his radical critique of capitalism in a series of fiction thrillers such as The Big Clock (1946) and The Crozart Story (1960). Later collections of his verse include Stranger at Coney Island (1949).

Alfred Hayes (1911–1985), born in England, was an autodidact versed in Baudelaire, Hopkins, and Heine, and a frequent contributor to Communist publications. His first volume of poetry, The Big Time, did not appear until 1944, when his political convictions had waned, and one of his most impressive, Welcome to the Castle, appeared in 1950. After World War II he became a successful novelist and screenplay writer.

Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972), closer to surrealism and anarchism than Communism, would soon publish Before the Brave (1936), First Will and Testament (1939), and The Teeth of the Lion. In 1941 he issued his revolutionary-pacifist, stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, The Journal of Albion Moonlight.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) treated social issues through modernist strategies and a metaphysical style. In 1935 she published Theory of Flight, followed by U.S. I (1938), A Turning Wind (1939), The Soul and Body of John Brown (1940), Wake Island (1942), Beast in View (1944), The Green Wave (1948), Orpheus (1949), Body of Waking (1958), Waterlily Fire (1962), The Speed of Darkness (1968), Breaking Open (1973), The Gates (1976), and Collected Poems (1979).

H. H. Lewis (1901–1985) proclaimed himself a devout Communist in works such as Red Renaissance (1930), Thinking of Russia (1932), Salvation (1934), and Road to Utterly: Poems Written by a Missouri Farmhand and Dedicated to Soviet Russia (1935). After the 1940s he lapsed into silence, isolation, and increasing eccentricity.

Ben Maddow (1909–1992) took the pen name David Wolff to keep his identity secret from employers, and published a small number of poems in Blues, Poetry, and the New Masses. In the mid-1930s Maddow began collaborating on radical films produced by Nykino and then Frontier Films. After World War II he launched a career in Hollywood, where he was blacklisted from 1952 to 1960.

James Neugass (1905–1949), from a wealthy New Orleans family, wrote poetry and worked at odd jobs in the 1930s until he volunteered for service as an ambulance driver with the International Brigades. Remaining close to the Communist movement through the 1940s, he drafted numerous unpublished novels until Rain of Ashes (1949), a harsh portrait of immediate relatives, was finally accepted just before his premature death.

William Pillin (1910–1985), born in Russia, was a poet and ceramic craftsman who also developed a special interest in music. Influenced by Rilke, Garcia Lorca, and Neruda, he published Poems (1939), Theory of Silence (1949), Dance without Shoes (1956), Passage after Midnight (1958), Pavanne for a Fading Memory (1964), and Everything Falling (1971). Originally active in the John Reed Club of Chicago, he moved to the Southwest and then West, increasingly attracted to anarchism.

Don West (1906–1992) was a pro-Communist poet, Christian minister, and lifelong labor activist who helped found the Highlander Folk School. His books include Crab-Grass (1931), Between the Plow Handles (1932), Toil and Hunger (1940), Broadside to the Sun (1946), Clods of Southern Earth (1946), The Road Is Rocky (1951), O Mountaineers! (1974), and In a Land of Plenty (1982).

The last poet listed in Proletarian Literature in the United States was Richard Wright (1908–1960), who initiated his literary career as a poet in Communist and John Reed Club publications. The only other African American contributor to the entire volume was Langston Hughes (1902–1967).

Many other African American poets of the era also had associations with the organized Left. Wright’s onetime friend Margaret Walker, author of For My People (1942), was pro-Communist when she launched her poetry career in the late 1930s and remained generally influenced by Marxism.

African American poet Countee Cullen (1903–1946), a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, episodically showed sympathy for the Communist-led Left. His books include Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927), The Black Christ (1929), and The Medea and Some Poems (1935).

Frank Marshall Davis (1905–1987) was close to the Communist Left, perhaps even a member in the 1940s. His collections include Black Man’s Verse (1935), I Am the American Negro (1937), Through Sepia Eyes (1938), and 47th Street: Poems (1948).

The poetry of Gwendolyn Bennett (1902–1981) mostly appeared before 1935. In the 1940s she became an administrator of two Communist-led educational centers, first the Jefferson School for Social Science and then the George Washington Carver School in Harlem.

Sterling Brown (1901–1989) was championed by the Communist Left at the time he published Southern Road (1932). A professor at Howard University, he was a prominent figure in the Federal Writers Project and also wrote books about African American prose, poetry, and drama.

The poet Robert Hayden (1913–1981) was a member of the Communist-led John Reed Club of Detroit. Revolutionary sentiments are quite evident in his first book, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940).

H. T. Tsiang (1899–1971), one of the more productive Asian American authors of imaginative literature in English of the interwar period, published Poems of the Chinese Revolution (1929); China Red (1931), an epistolary novel; The Hanging on Union Square (1935), an “American Epic” novel; And China Has Hands (1937), a novel of New York’s Chinatown; and China Marches On (1938), a three-act play.

Lynn Riggs (1899–1954), a poet and dramatist who was part Cherokee from Oklahoma, was active in the League of American Writers in the 1930s. In the 1940s he drew close to the Communist movement in Hollywood but was discouraged from joining due to his homosexuality.

A unique phenomenon that deserves attention is the relation of the small group of objectivist poets to the Communist Left. George Oppen (1908–1984) published Discrete Series in 1934, and thereafter became a Comunist activist for two decades. He fled to Mexico in the McCarthy era, then resurfaced as a poet with The Materials (1962), This in Which (1965), Of Being Numerous (1968), Seascape (1973), Collected Poems (1975), and Primitive (1978).

Carl Rakosi (b. 1903) came to the United States from Germany in 1910 and worked as a social worker for much of his life under the legally adopted name Callman Rawley. Drawn to the Communist Party for several decades, he stopped writing poetry for twenty-five years. His works include Selected Poems (1941), Two Poems (1971), Ere-Voice (1971), Ex Cranium, and Night (1975).

Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978), also attracted to Communism, achieved recognition even later than the other objectivists. In the 1930s Zukofsky contributed to the New Masses and was on the Executive Committee of the League of American Writers. His books A 1–12 appeared in 1959, All the Collected Poems, 1923–1958, in 1965, and All the Collected Short Poems, 1956–1964, in 1965.

Not all the Left poets were associated with Communism. Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) remained an independent socialist. Mark Van Doren (1894–1972), William Rose Benét (1886–1950), and Stephen Vincent Benét (1899–1943) were liberals in sympathy with the Popular Front. Josephine Johnson (1910–1990) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning radical novelist who also published the poetry collection Year’s End (1937). She was briefly involved with John Reed Club members and the League of American Writers, but married a Trotskyist and became increasingly drawn to ecological and pacifist themes. Trotskyism, in fact, attracted several of the most talented poets, as well as some minor ones, such as Florence Becker (1895–1984), who was expelled from the League of American Writers for her politics in 1939.

The New Englander John Brooks Wheelwright (1897–1940), who may have been the preeminent revolutionary poet in the high modernist mode, was a member of the Trotskyist faction in the Socialist Party and a founder of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. His collections Rock and Shell (1933), Mirrors of Venus (1938), and Political Self-Portrait (1940) trace the evolution of his political, cultural, and religious thought. The Collected Poems of John Wheelwright (1972) was published three decades after his death to considerable acclaim.

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) was more indirectly associated with Trotskyism through Partisan Review magazine. These were the years when he published In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938), Shenandoah (1941), and Genesis (1943).

Sherry Mangan (born John Joseph Sherry Mangan, 1904–1961), became a Trotskyist after publishing the novel Cinderella Married (1932) and the collection No Apology for Poetrie and Other Poems Written 1922–1931 (1934), and just before the long poem Salutation to Valediction (1938). During and after World War II he worked for the Fourth International in Europe and Latin America. A selection of his work appeared posthumously in Blackness of a White Night: Stories and Poems by Sherry Mangan (1987).

It would be difficult to find any poet of the 1930s and 1940s untouched by some degree of radical thought. However, the course of the radical poetry tradition associated with the midcentury rise and fall of the organized Left can be most accurately traced by the record of the leading publications of the Communist movement (New Masses, Daily Worker, People’s World, International Literature, Mainstream, and Masses and Mainstream), as well as the scores of magazines that sprang up around Communist-led cultural organizations such as the John Reed Clubs, League of American Writers (especially Directions), Labor Poets of America (Sing America!), Contemporary Writers, Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions, and the Harlem Writers Club. Jewish Life (later Jewish Currents) and California Quarterly are useful sources as well.

The most influential writers tended to appear in anthologies, or special issues of journals, featuring mainly pro-Communist authors and fellow-travelers. In addition to We Gather Strength and Proletarian Literature in the United States, such collections include the “Social Poets Number” of Poetry, edited by Horace Gregory (May 1936); Salud! Poems and Sketches of Spain by American Writers, edited by Alan Calmer (1938); War Poems of the United Nations, sponsored by the League of American Writers and edited by Joy Davidman (1943); Seven Poets in Search of an Answer: A Poetic Symposium, edited by Thomas Yoseloff (1944); and The Rosenbergs: Poems of the United States, edited by Martha Millet (1957). Also influential were a substantial number of the mid-twentieth-century poets appearing in The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest, edited by Walter Lowenfels (1969), and On Freedom’s Side: An Anthology of American Poems of Protest, edited by Aaron Kramer (1972).

Those Left poets most frequently featured in such places in the 1930s and 1940s include a range of writers, some of whose work eventually achieved considerable recognition and others of whose contributions dropped entirely from sight. One of the latter is Alexander R Bergman (born Alexander Frankel; 1912–1941), a devoted young Communist whose writings were posthumously collected in They Look like Men (1944).

Millen Brand (1906–1980), most famous for his 1937 novel The Outward Room, was a leading activist in the League of American Writers and contributed poetry to the New Masses. Collections of his poems, which did not appear until later years, and include Dry Summer in Provence (1966), Local Lives (1975), and the posthumous volume Peace March (1980).

John Malcom Brinnin (b. 1916) was editor of the left-wing literary journals New Writers and Signatures in the 1930s. His published poetry volumes include The Garden Is Political (1942), The Lincoln Lyrics (1942), No Arch, No Triumph (1945), The Sorrows of Cold Stone (1951), and Skin Diving in the Virgins (1970).

Joy Davidman (1915–1960) was a dedicated Communist who worked on the staff of the New Masses in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Her Letter to a Comrade (1939) won the Yale Younger Poets Series award. After World War II she underwent a religious conversion and eventually moved to England, where she married C. S. Lewis.

The African American poet and dramatist Owen Dodson (1914–1983) appeared in left-wing magazines during the 1940s. His early plays were antiracist and antifascist, and his first volume of poetry was Powerful Long Ladder (1946).

Vincent Ferrini (1913-2007), who sometimes published as Vincent Ferous, began his career with a series of proletarian verse such as No Smoke (1941), Injunction (1943), and Blood of the Tenement (1944). Although he remained on the Left, his style evolved in new directions as he published more than twenty-five books, one of the most important of which is Know Fish (1979).

Don Gordon (1902–1989), among the finest craftsmen of Left poetry, was a Communist blacklisted from the film industry where he worked as a reader in Hollywood studios. Remaining on the Left all his life, he published Statement (1943), Civilian Poems (1946), On the Ward (1977), Excavations (1979), and The Sea of Tranquility (1989).

Rolfe Humphries (1894–1969) worked as a Latin teacher while a leading activist in the League of American Writers and a pro-Communist in the late 1930s. Having published a volume of poems in 1928, Europa and Other Poems and Sonnets, Humphries coedited the pro-Republican collection … And Spain Sings (1937), translating about one-third of the poems in the volume from the Spanish. By 1940 he lost interest in Communism, although he translated Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York (1940) and Aragon, Poet of the French Resistance (1945). Humphries’s Collected Poems appeared in 1965, and Poets, Poetics and Politics: America’s Literary Community Viewed from the Letters of Rolfe Humphries, 1910–1969, was published in 1992.

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), whose Intellectual Things appeared in 1930, was a member of the John Reed Club and active in the League of American Writers. His views remained generally anarchist as his style evolved from metaphysical to more natural speech in Passport to the War (1940), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Selected Poems (1958), The Testing Tree (1971), The Wellfleet Whale (1983), and Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985).

Ruth Lechlitner (1901–1989), a committed leftist active in the League of American Writers, was a poetry reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune Book Review for twenty-five years. Her collections include Tomorrow’s Phoenix (1937), Only the Years (1944), The Shadow of the Hour (1956), and A Changing Season: Selected and New Poems, 1962–1972 (1973).

The poet and pioneer filmmaker Willard Maas (1911–1971) held membership in the Communist Party for a while and was author of Fire Testament (1935) and Concerning the Young (1938).

Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982), whose relations with Communism may be more significant than generally acknowledged, was a member of the Executive Committee of the League of American Writers 1935 and chaired a public session at its Second Congress. Panic (1935), a verse drama, and Public Speech (1936) clearly exhibit his support for collectivist social action.

Ettore Rella (1907?–1988) was born in Telluride, Colorado, of Italian and Albanian parents. He was associated with the Communist-led cultural milieu from the 1930s to the 1950s, and his books include Here and Now (1942), Spring Song on an Old Theme and Other Poems (1966), and The Scenery of the Play (1981).

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) belonged to the Communist Party after he settled in San Francisco in the 1920s, and he was active in the John Reed Club in the early 1930s. He became increasingly disaffected from the Party during the decade, and his radicalism took on a more anarchist cast. Rexroth’s books include In What Hour (1940), The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944), and The Signature of All Things (1949).

Merrill Root (1895–1973), a friend of Rolfe Humphries, was pro-Communist in the 1930s but later turned sharply to the right and became poetry editor of the John Birch Society’s American Opinion. His books include Lost Eden (1927), Bow of Burning Gold (1929), Dawn Is Forever (1938), and Before the Swallow Dares (1947).

Norman Rosten (1914–1995) was a poet, playwright, and novelist who worked for the Federal Theater and published frequently in the New Masses. His books include Return Again Traveler (1940), The Fourth Decade and Other Poems (1943), The Big Road (1946), Songs for Patricia (1951), The Plane and the Shadow (1953), and Thrive upon the Rock (1965), He was especially successful in the poetic dramas that he produced for radio in the 1940s.

Eli Siegel (1902–1978) was born in Dvinsk, Latvia, and came to the United States in 1905. Originally he was an associate of V. F. Calverton in founding Modern Quarterly, but drew closer to the Communist Party and was the mentor of the Labor Poets of America and Young Labor Poets in the late 1930s. Later on Siegel created the doctrine of “Aesthetic Realism,” which he defined as “the seeing of the world, art and self as explaining each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Although he began publishing individual poems in the 1920s, his books came out in the 1950s, including Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana (1957) and Hail, American Development (1958). He also published literary criticism about William Carlos Williams and Henry James.

John Varney (1888–1967) made several trips to the Soviet Union and spent a great deal of time in Europe in the 1920s. In addition to editing Exile from a Future Time: Posthumous Poems of Sol Funaroff (1943), Varney published many books of his own works: First Wounds: A Story in Five Chapters of Verse (1926), Sketches of Soviet Russia (1920), Sparrow Hawks (1950), Stalingrad, New Years (1943), Star Men, U.S.A. (1956), Spun Sequence (1960), and Poems for a Prose Age (1960).

Theodore Carl Wilson (published as T. C. Wilson; 1912–1950) was a protégé of Horace Gregory who held an equal interest in high modernist and proletarian poetry. Wilson coedited the spring 1935 issue of Bozart-Westminister Magazine with Ezra Pound, as well as contributed to New Masses.

The 1950s brought a distinctly new climate of aggressive political repression against which Left poetry frequently defined itself. The revolutionary writer who most directly resisted these reactionary times, Aaron Kramer (1921–1997), was a writer who fully embodied the traditions and trajectory of mid-twentieth century Left poetry. Born into a socialist cultural milieu that was also secularly Yiddish, Kramer was in junior high school when he announced himself a “people’s poet” and began writing for the New Pioneer. From his college period and into the 1950s, Kramer tried to sustain and develop certain precise traditions of radical and romantic poetry that were becoming unfashionable, even on the Left. In addition to appearing in Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944), Kramer’s early volumes include The Glass Mountain (1946), The Thunder of the Grass (1948), Thru Every Window! (1950) and Roll the Forbidden Drums (1954). He also published an important work of translation, The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine (1948).

In the post-Holocaust years, Kramer came to write more explicitly on Jewish history and themes, but always regarded himself as Jewish in an internationalist context. His early volumes, however, show a much greater attraction to heroes and themes from African American history, as evidenced by Denmark Vesey (1952). In the 1940s, Kramer read with Langston Hughes, and in 1949 he was the only white member of the Harlem Writers Club. He was also the only white member on the board of Harlem Quarterly, and later he was one of the few white contributors to Freedomways.

In 1953 Kramer severed his associations with the Communist Party, becoming an independent revolutionary for the rest of his life. He completed a Ph.D. in English at New York University in 1966, and then published a number of scholarly books such as The Prophetic Tradition in American Poetry (1968) and Melville’s Poetry: Toward the Enlarged Heart (1972). A Century of Yiddish Poetry (1989) established Kramer as the foremost translator in the field, and he subsequently devoted considerable effort to additional research into the lives of his subjects as well as new translations. His later books of poetry—Carousel Parkway (1980), The Burning Bush (1983), In Wicked Times (1983), and Indigo and Other Poems (1992)—focused more on experiences of everyday life, although often with a political and historical sensibility.

There are numerous other left-wing poets whose careers were launched during or profoundly shaped by the 1950s. They come from a variety of backgrounds and regions and belong to several generations.

John Beecher (1904–1980) was born in Birmingham, Alabama. His collections include Report to the Stockholders and Other Poems (1962), To Live and Die in Dixie and Other Poems (1966), Hear the Wind Blow: Poems of Protest and Prophecy (1968), and Collected Poems, 1924–1974 (1974).

Olga Cabral (1909-1997), born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, British West Indies, was married to the Yiddish poet Aaron Kurtz (1891–1964). Her books include Cities and Deserts (1959), The Evaporated Man (1968), Tape Found in a Bottle (1971), The Darkness in My Pockets (1976), Occupied Country (1976).

Alvaro Cardona-Hine (1926-2016) came to the United States from San José, Costa Rica, and studied at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a frequent contributor of poetry and reviews to both Masses and Mainstream and the National Guardian. His books include The Gathering Wave (1961), The Flesh of Utopia (1966), Menatash (1969), Agapito (1969), Words on Paper (1973), and The Half-Eaten Angel (1981).

The poet and translator Robert Friend (1913-1998), a Communist in his youth, emigrated to Israel in 1951. His books include Shadow of the Sun (1941), Now (1964), Salt Gifts (1964), and The Practice of Absence (1971). In recent years, Friend has identified himself as a gay poet.

Gene Frumkin (1928-2007) was born in New York and graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles. Frumkin was never a Communist but was closely associated with Tom McGrath, contributed to Masses and Mainstream, and was cofounder of the left-wing literary journal Coastlines in 1955, serving as poetry editor until 1958. His books include The Hawk and the Lizard (1953), The Orange Tree (1964), and The Rainbow Walker (1971).

George Hitchcock (1914-2010) was a longtime Communist who became editor of Kayak in 1964. His work is strongly influenced by surrealism and his books include Poems and Prints (1962), Tactics of Survival and Other Poems (1964), and The Dolphin with the Revolver in Its Teeth (1967).

A gay poet with a background, like Robert Friend’s, in the Brooklyn College Left is Chester Kallman (1921–1975). Kallman was the companion of W. H. Auden for thirty-four years; in fact, they met at a 6 April 1939 gathering of the Communist-led League of American Writers. Kallman’s poems were later published as Absent and Present (1963).

Audre Lorde (1934–1992), African American poet and a lesbian, was a member of the Communist youth group the Labor Youth League in the 1950s. Her books include The New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), The Black Unicorn (1978), and Our Dead behind Us (1986).

Eve Merriam (1916–1992), closely associated with Communist organizations and publications in the late 1940s and early 1950s, became the highly successful author of adult and juvenile poetry. Her adult poetry includes Family Circle (1946), Tomorrow Morning (1953), Montgomery, Alabama, Money, Mississippi and Other Places (1957), The Double Bed: From the Feminine Side (1958), The Inner City Mother Goose (1969), and The Nixon Poems (1970). Her writing was sharply critical of sexism, as well as especially effective at combining witty wordplay with social commentary.

The early verse of Martha Millet (1919-2004) appeared in the Young Pioneer in the 1930s, and she later contributed to Masses and Mainstream. Her books are Thine Alabaster Cities (1952), a long dramatic poem, and Dangerous Jack: A Fantasy in Verse (1953).

A famous Beat gay poet, Harold Norse (1916-2009) records some of his Communist activities as a Brooklyn College student in Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (1989). His first collection of poetry, The Undersea Mountain, appeared in 1953.

Naomi Replansky (1918-2018) appeared in Communist and other publications in the 1940s. Aggressively championed by Thomas McGrath, she published Ring Song in 1952 and The Dangerous World in 1995.

The Communist poet most active in bringing the traditions of the Old Left into interaction with the burgeoning New Left of the 1960s was Walter Lowenfels (1897–1976). Starting in the mid-1950s he declared himself the heir of Walt Whitman and by the early 1960s was making an impact as an early advocate of multiculturalism and the scourge of literary anthologists who excluded African American poets.

Lowenfels was born in New York, the son of a successful wholesale dealer in butter. In 1926 he went to Paris, becoming friends with Michael Fraenkel, Anaïs Nin, and Henry Miller. He published in Transition and brought out a series of short books including Episodes and Epistles (1925), Finale of Seem: A Lyrical Narrative (1929), Apollinaire: An Elegy (1930), Elegy for D. H. Lawrence (1932), The Suicide (1934), and Some Deaths (1934). After returning to the United States and becoming radicalized, Lowenfels published Steel (1937), in which he applied techniques of his Paris period to events such as the Spanish Civil War and the drive by the Congress of Industrial Organizations to organize Little Steel.

In 1939, Lowenfels ended his career as a poet and briefly tried to support his family in the butter business. However, at age forty he reversed course and joined the Communist Party, remaining a member for the rest of his life. Starting in 1940, he worked for the Daily Worker in Philadelphia. In 1953, he was arrested, jailed, tried, and sentenced to two years in prison under the Smith Act. However, higher courts overturned the decision due to lack of evidence. In the meantime, at age fifty-four, Lowenfels returned to poetry, developing a writing style that seemed to embody a transcendentalist perspective on the world; his task became to decode the physical reality by reaching to what he called “Reality Prime.”

Books of this latter period include Sonnets of Love and Liberty (1955), American Voices (1959), Some Deaths: Selected Poems, 1929–1962 (1964), To an Imaginary Daughter (1964), Land of Roseberries (1965), Translations from Scorpius (1966), We Are All Poets, Really (1967), Thou Shalt Not Overkill: Walter Lowenfels’ Peace Poems (1968), The Portable Walter: From the Prose and Poetry of Walter Lowenfels (1968), Found Poems and Others (1972), and The Revolution Is to Be Human (1973). Perhaps Lowenfels’s greatest impact was in his remarkable literary anthologies that managed to combine works of the older generations of Left poets with younger voices, especially writers of color. These include Poets of Today (1966), Where Is Vietnam?: American Poets Respond (1967), In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969), The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest (1969), From the Belly of the Shark (1973), and For Neruda, for Chile: An International Anthology (1973).

Despite Lowenfels’s efforts, the older tradition decisively fragmented and dispersed. This is due more to the collapse of an organized Left than a decline in the radical and revolutionary impulse among US poets, an impulse that would find of other outlets.

Ehlers, Sarah. Left of Poetry; depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetry. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Folsom, Franklin. Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers, 1937–1942. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1944.

Lowney. John. History, Memory and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935-68. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Smethurst, James. The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Writing, 1930-1944. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Steven, Mark. Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2017.

Wald, Alan. Writing from the Left. London: Verso, 1994.