Lowenfels, Walter

LOWENFELS, WALTER (1897-1976). A leading figure of the US literary left, Walter Lowenfels began composing poetry in 1919 and served as editor of the Pennsylvania edition of the Daily Worker. He also edited several anthologies that offered vital exposure to generations of under-recognized writers.

Born in Manhattan to a successful business family, Lowenfels enlisted into the Army in 1917, remaining in uniform through the conclusion of World War I. although he spent no time on the battlefield. He later stated that he had been “illiterate in war and peace and politics.” Influenced deeply by the modernists, Lowenfels refuted his father’s business and ventured headfirst into poetry, publishing a first collection in 1925, Episodes and Epistles. He married Lillian Apotheker a year later, and the two relocated to Europe under the guise of Lowenfels’ seeking psychoanalysis by Freud at his father’s insistence. However, they headed not to Vienna but Paris where Lowenfels focused on writing. There, he befriended Henry Miller, Anais Nin, T.S. Elliot and Michael Fraenkel, among other notables.

With Fraenkel, Lowenfels founded the independent Carrefour Press, though their plans of publishing Beckett and Fitzgerald went unrealized. Lowenfels and Fraenkel founded, too, the short-lived Anonymous Movement, an experiment in author comradeship seeking to remove all competition from publishing. By 1931 Lowenfels was awarded the Richard Aldington Poetry Prize in a tie with e.e. cummings, an accomplishment that confirmed his prominence within the Parisian arts community. He also joined into Miller and Nin’s “death school of writing”, contributing, among others, “The Suicide” (1934) following the death of Hart Crane. Lowenfels had a clear, disturbing view of rising fascism in Europe, leading to his study of Marx. The international mobilization of Communists prompted him to reimagine the role of poetry in the face of vast oppression.

After returning home, Lowenfels completed a collection inspired by the arduous, bloody “Little Steel” strike (Steel 1937), but its experimental, modern brand sat not well with the CPUSA hierarchy. He struggled with a reckoning of the CP’s Popular Front-minded rejection of modernism and focused instead on journalism for the Daily Worker. He and Apotheker, in 1938, relocated to Philadelphia where he edited the Pennsylvania Worker and in 1940 ran for the Pennsylvania Legislature on the Communist Party ticket. Apotheker, a studied woman holding a Master’s degree, worked as a schoolteacher. In this period, future Almanac Singer Lee Hays, during his sojourn in New York, spent considerable time in the Lowenfels’ family home in Philadelphia where Hays and Lowenfels wrote songs together including “Wasn’t That a Time?” In 1951, the Lowenfels moved to Weymouth, New Jersey. Two years later he was arrested under the Smith Act. Lowenfels’s response to the FBI agents famously recalled Shelley: “the Administration has now acknowledged poets as legislators.” By 1953, he was convicted, but the case was overturned due to lack of evidence. He was arrested and convicted again in 1954, this time for “distributing subversive materials,” This conviction was overturned. Lowenfels made the conscious decision to return to poetry as a statement against the power structure and resigned from the Worker. Lillian Apotheker also became subject to investigation, and a Congressional hearing ultimately cost her job. In 1958, she suffered a stroke and Lowenfels became primary caretaker until she died in 1975.

Lowenfels’s poetry in this time remained within the experimental but was inspired by strong connections to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, the New York Poetry School, and the civil rights and anti-war movements he supported. These influences are reflected in his associate editorship of Dialog magazine and Poets of Today: A New American Anthology (1964). Pete Seeger also put several of his poems to music in this period, and Lowenfels grew in stature within the youthful, progressive community. In Seeger’s book The Incomplete Folksinger (1972), he referred to Lowenfels as “a nimble-witted poet” who “turns out reams and volumes of sparkling poetry and provocative prose.” In 1967 Lowenfels anthologized anti-war poems in Where is Vietnam? and was heard reading along with others on the LP Poets of Today: A New American Anthology (Broadside). By decade’s end, he had collected a robust set, The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest. He was a welcome voice in the Poetry Project. Lowenfels’s latter works include an autobiography, My Many Lives: The Poetry of My Politics (1968), and a poetry collection The Revolution is to Be Human (1973).

Later in life, Lowenfels was celebrated as a cultural elder and lecturer. He and Apotheker resided in Tarrytown, New York, where he frequented CP Arts Club meetings. In total, Lowenfels published some twenty books of his work. However, as often stated, his edited anthologies were just as creative, standing as collages of the time. Some focused on ethnic groups neglected by the media. Lowenfels also engaged in important translations of foreign-language poets and anthologized Walt Whitman, the poet who served as his greatest influence.

Lowenfels, Walter. My Many Lives: The Poetry of My Politics. Gainsville, Fla: Olivant, 1968.

Lowenfels, Walter and Nan Braymer, editors. Where is Vietnam? Garden City, NJ: Anchor, 1967.

Lowenfels, Walter. The Portable Walter, Robert Gover, editor. New York: International Publishers, 1968.

Burns, Jim. “Walter Lowenfels”, Penniless Press (Issue 11, Winter, 1999-2000) http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/prose/walter_lowenfels.htm

Walter Lowenfels Papers. Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library. Archives at Yale. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/1544