Making It New: 1900–1945 449Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948) offered a succinct, laconic, but almost novelistic
account of a farm family going under to dispossession and destitution. Others
employed surrealism or expressionism or other nonnaturalistic means to get their
message across. In “Papermill” (1931), for instance, Joseph Kalar (1906–1972) wrote
in a kind of Depression Gothic style to describe the “chill empty rooms” of a disused
and abandoned factory. Similarly, in “Season of Death” (1935), Edwin Rolfe (1909–
1954) fused realism and the supernatural in his portrait of “the sixth winter” of
economic ruin, with the dead and the dying haunting each “darkened street.”
Kay Boyle (1903–1993) used a rich variety of poetic modes in “A Communication to
Nancy Cunard” (1937) to explore the plight of nine young black men in Scottsboro,
Alabama who were tried and convicted for rape on false testimony. Tillie Olsen
(1912– 2007) used the long line and incremental repetition of Whitman to describe
the exploitation of Mexican-American women in the Southwest in “I Want You
Women Up North to Know” (1934). Taggard used the tradition of spirituals in the
poem-sequence “To the Negro People” (1939–1941), her tribute to the oppression
and the courage of African-Americans. There are poems about the sufferings of
working people (“Asbestos” (1928) by Rolfe), the persecution of those who tried
to represent them (“Stone Face” (1935) by Lula Ridge (1871–1941)). There are
poems about the Spanish Civil War, which is seen generally as Hemingway saw it, as
a dress rehearsal for a worldwide struggle against fascism (“Elegeia” (1948) by Rolfe;
“To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (1941) by Taggard). There are
poems that respond to contemporary waves of anti-immigrant feeling by insisting
“the alien is the nation” (“Ode in Time of Crisis” (1940) by Taggard), and those that
see economic crisis and social deprivation as a useful breeding ground for revolution:
“Good bye Christ, good morning Revolution!” concludes a piece called “Goodbye
Christ” by Langston Hughes. To be politically engaged, even an activist, did not,
however, prescribe one style or subject for these writers – something that is clear
from the work of the four most accomplished radical poets of the period, Kenneth
Rexroth (1905–1982), Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982), Kenneth Fearing (1902–
1961), and Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972).
With Rexroth, the nature of his political commitment is clear from the conclusion
to a poem called “New Objectives, New Cadres,” one of the many gathered together
in The Collected Shorter Poems (1967) (The Collected Longer Poems was published a
year later, to be followed by several other volumes, including The Morning Star:
Poems and Translations (1979)). The narrator describes an “arch dialectic satyriast”
and activist and lecturer “drawing pointless incisive diagrams” for an audience of
“miners and social workers.” “We do not need his confessions,” the narrative voice
observes: “The future is more fecund than Molly Bloom – / The problem is to control
history, / We already understand it.” This has many of the trademarks of Rexroth’s
poetry, and indeed of his prose in An Autobiographical Novel (1966) and his critical
essay collections, The Bird in the Bush (1959) and Assays (1961): a cool, sardonic, and
yet passionate tone, a fierce commitment to the community of ordinary people,
and an equally fierce hatred of intellectuals (“spectacled men,” as he calls them in
another poem), the sense of a spirit as flinty and tenacious as the Western landscapeGGray_c04.indd 449ray_c 04 .indd 449 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM