94 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
while he was a prisoner, partly to comfort him in his physical and
mental torment and partly to while away the hours spent in a soli
tary cell. "It was not dislike for my craft, nor ambition, nor per
sonal interest that induced me to try to be a writer," the craftsman
commented apologetically. "I found an appalling gap in literature
... and went to work because I realized no other German writer
would undertake to fill it." Having turned on several occasions
from needle and shears to the pen, he explained that he did not
write for a living, but lived to write so that he might help society
along its slow road to progress. He admitted, however, that he had
sold the collection of poems for a little necessary cash, adding
drily, "Even the communist who is working to abolish money,
cries for it."
Weitling's poems are not great poetry, and they would lose all
vitality if an effort were made to translate them. They are some
what in the style of Friedrich von Schiller, whose poems the au
thor frequently quoted, and of whose "Bürgschaft" he was espe
cially fond. They give a vivid, if exaggerated and overdramatized,
picture of the mental and physical sufferings which a sensitive soul
experiences in prison. Although they made little impression either
in literary circles or among the workers, their author liked his
work, carried copies with him to the United States, and from time
to time made marginal corrections and additions in his personal
copy. Some were published in the Paris Vorwärts, which also
printed Heine's "Die armen Weber" and "Wintermärchen," but
the poems were read by comparatively few people. Nevertheless,
the police of Breslau seized the first four copies to reach that city,
and Magdeburg forbade their sale as dangerous and incendiary
literature.^3
The following titles suggest the direct bearing which these
poems have on their author's prison experiences: "Conscience,"
"Temptation," "The Betrayer," "To My Judge," "To My Prose
cutor," "Hope," and "The Monster," the last referring to a spy
planted in an adjoining cell. Several poems, though influenced by
(^3) Marx-Engels Archiv, II (1927), 606.