The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 8, 1927, Page 8

Poetry and Revolutiom Revolutionary poetry may be the result either of deep protest or discontent, or of a radical change in society. There was revolutionary poetry in Rus- sia before the lata Revolution of the Bolsheviki, and there was revolutionary poetry, too, in Ger- many in the eighteen-twenties, long before the pro- letariat was organized into either party or union, It is clear that certain dissections and definitions are imperative. In the first place, revolutionary poetry, it is obvious, is the result of an exciting and agitating social urge. It could scarcely arise tm a placid society. It discloses the existence of social struggle and conflict. The artist is often unaware of the entire implications and extensions of his revolt. Of course, there are artists who are consciously revolutionary in their social attitude as well as their esthetic. The latter, however, are fewer in number than the former. The reaction of the artist is part of the behavior of social change. The extensity and intensity of his revolt is dependent upon his chemistry of character as well as his degree of social vision. Social vision alone does not give genius to the artist’s touch, but it is the mecessary background for great social art, the production of moving social beauty. Poems of protest are abundant; poems of fevo- Aution are few. A poem such as Francis Adams’ To the Christians, “Take, then, your paltry Christ, * Your gentleman God, We want the carpenter’s son, With his saw and hod. We want the man who loved The poor and the oppressed, ,Who hated the rich man and king And the scribe and the priest We want the Galilean Who knew cross and rod. It’s your “good taste” that prefers A bastard “God!” is certainly denunciatory of the bourgeoisie, but with its Christian sentimentalism, is assuredly not a poem of revolutionary vision. Margaret Widde- mer’s Factories is a poem of social appeal: I have ehut my little sister from life and light (For a rose, for a ribbon, for a wreath across my hair), I have made her restless feet still until the night, Locked from sweets of summer and from wild spring air; I who ranged the meadow lands, free from sun to sun, . Free to sing and pull the buds and watch the far™~ wings fly, , I have bound my sister till her playing-time is done Oh, my little sister, was it I?—was it I? I have robbed my sister of her day of maidenhood (or a robe, for a feather, for a trinket’s restless spark), Shut from Love til dusk shall fall, how shall she know good, How shall she pass scathless through the sinlit dark? I who could be innocent, I who could be gay, I who could have love and mirth before the light went by, I have put my sister in her mating-time away— Bister, my young sister.—was it 1?—was it I? I have robbed my sister of the lips against her breast @or a coin, for the weaving of my children’s lace and lawn), Feet that pace beside the loom, hands that cannot rest, How can she know motherhood, whose strength is gone? 1 who took no heed of her, starved and labor-worn, —_— —— y V. F. Calverton & egainst whose placid heart my sleepy gold heads lie Round my path they cry to me, little souls unborn, God of Life—Creator! was I! It was I! and yet, it too, is not a revolutionary effort. Even such a spirited and rhythmic poem as Mase- fild’s Consecration: Not of the princes and pledates with periwigged charioteers Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years, Rather the scorned—the rejected—the men hemmed in with the spears; The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, ¢ Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries, The men with the broken heads and the blood run- ning into their eyes, Not the be-medaled commander, beloved of the throne, Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot ba known, Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of The slave with the sack on his shoulders priced on with the goad, The - _— too weighty a burden, too weary a The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout, The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired lookout, Others may sing of the wime and the wealth and the mirth, The portly presence of potentates godly in girth;— Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth! Theirs be the music, the color, the glory, the gold; Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould, Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold— Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tale be told... © is not a revolutionary production. . All of these poems express sympathy for the pro- letariat, all are in protest against a society that breeds poverty, hunger, and pain, yet none possesses revolutionary insight or philosophy. They are all part of that movement that marked the rise of new forms and the slow decay of old idealg in the lat- ter part of the eighteenth century. They are in re volt against things aristocratic. They despise, too, the acquisite ideal. The lower dlasses have cap- tured their sympathy. At one time it was Rous- seau, at another Paine, who believed in the future of democracy. For Paine, as for Mary Wollstone- craft and the Utilitarians who grew into a school of philosophic and economic significance, private property was a virtue instead of a vice.. Yet despite their philosophic defense of private-property these thinkers were part of the democratic movement we have described. They had @ sympathy for the commoner. It was not a class-conscious sympathy, to be sure, but a sympathy that was significant in contrast to the contempt with which the older aris- tocracies had regarded the toiler. Out of this move- ment sprang the exclamatory enthusiasm of William Blake, the English poet, who, donning a red cap, declared himself q liberty-boy—‘the shape of my head makes me so”—and who later was arrested for crying “Damn the king and you too!” when he tried to eject an officious soldier from his gardens, Burns, too; and the early Wadsworth, and Cow- per, the young Southey and Coleridge, were ex- pressive of the same reaction. The poet was moved often to an exciting if not ecstatic and revolutionary madness. Cowper, with all his pious skepticism, was thrilled by the Revolution, and called it a “won- derful period in the history of mankind.” Burns was beautifully dynamic in his enthusiasm. It was he who sent guns from a captured smuggling ves- sel to the Convention in Paris, and who enraged a@ military officer by stating that England, in her war with France, should meet with the failure she deserved. Burns’ poem, A Man’s a Man for a’ That, was written at this time, most likely in 1789, although it was not published until 1791. Words- worth was gay in hig early rebelliousness. To be alive was good, but to be alive was very heaven— such was the sentiment of the early Wordsworth who caressed love in those days wwith the careless- ness of a young Lothario. As late as 1794 he wrote to his friend Mathews: “I am of that odious class of men called democrats and of that class I shall forever con- tinue.” > In another plate he wrote, with equal fervor: “Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every specie, I think, must necessarily coun- teract the progress of human improvement, hence it follows that I am not amongst the ad- mirers of the British Constitution.” In the actual words of their poetry, these men stood with the suppressed classes. That their stand was sentimental is not to be argued. It was a sentimentality, however, that was persuasive and, at the time, influential.. Burns’ poem, A Man’s a Man for a’ That, was expressive of an attitude that was not to be found in the aristocratic and bour- geois literature that had preceded Goldsmith’s lines: “Til fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay: Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied,” while not revolutionary in either form or substance, did chalk the growth of this sentiment of sympathy for the dispossessed which had not been known in literature, except by way of vain gesture of ef- fusion, since the days of Jeremiah, Our poetry, today, then, is chiefly poetry of pro- test inatead of poetry of revolution. Ag poetry of Protest is is even adulterated with sugar phrase and lachrymose attachment. Dronke’s lines: “And for your blood of God demand Grim penalty,”