Stanley Burnshaw: The New Masses Years

Stanley Burnshaw's broad compass embraces seven decades. He is described by Alfred Kazin as a "remarkable writer-biographer, theorist, critic and translator of poetry and a fresh and vivid poet himself" in his latest work, A Stanley Burnshaw Reader (1990). Karl Shapiro characterizes him as "one of our best respected men of letters." Burnshaw's writing--his poetry foremost--biography, criticism and editing will endure.His critical success, The Seamless Web (1991), a seminal source on e subject of creativity, is praised by James Dickey for its "eloquent and persuasive argument" (vii). The Poem Itself (1989) deals with some 45 poets translated and presented in a manner that enables English-speaking readers to experience more than 150 poems by modern foreign poets. Burnshaw and his collaborators Provide a radical innovation to the art of poetry translation that 30 years later continues in use by scholars across the country. In the Terrified Radiance (1972) fixes Burnshaw's thesis that poetry "starts with the body and ends with the body."Burnshaw is author of 14 books in all, beginning with Poems (1927). His play, The Bridge (1945), is a powerful political allegory. His major prose includes The Sunless Sea (1948), The Refusers: An Epic of the Jews (1981) and Mirages: Travel Notes in the Promised Land (1977)--and some two dozen edited works. Another notable contribution is his biography Robert Frost Himself (1986), an intensely personal view that assures Burnshaw an enduring literary grace-note. As Frost's last editor, Burnshaw produced an insightful work that penetrates the personal obscurity of a prominent public person.Burnshaw's editing career commands a literary niche--first with his early work for the Cordon Company, then as a founder of the Dryden Press and later as a senior editorial officer with Holt, Rinehart and Winston. A little-known part of that career, however, occurs in the mid-1930s when he served as an editor with the New Masses (Stead 125-43). Here Burnshaw was able to work in a literary milieu that reflected his political and sociological beliefs. This article proposes to illuminate that portion of Burnshaw's career.Burnshaw, an ideological radical, was born into privileged circumstances but most of his early work carries a theme for social justice, a call for revolutionary social order and a voice for blacks. His father, a notable influence (My Friend, My Father 1986) on Burnshaw, was a language teacher of Latin, Greek and German, who directed a child-care institution primarily for Jewish victims of the Czarist pogroms. Straitened circumstances after the first World War compelled the family's move to Pittsburgh, where Burnshaw earned a B.A. in 1924. His first job was as advertising copywrite for Blaw-Knox, a steel-product company. He did well and in his free time wrote poetry reflecting his socio-communist ideology. These poems were published in a number of magazines and later collected in The Iron Land (1936).Encouraged and partially financed by his father, Burnshaw and his wife traveled to Europe in 1927-28. Upon his return, he managed to find another advertising position, at Hecht's in New York City, that paid $8,500 a year, a handsome sum for 1929. The trip to Europe failed to liberate Burnshaw from his socialistic ideology, as his father had hoped. Burnshaw sent a group of his poems to the monthly New Masses, which rejected them. Other magazines showed interest, however. While at Hecht's Burnshaw served as a contributing editor for the Marxist Modern Monthly before he joined New Masses.Its predecessor, The Masses (1911-17), was a socialistic magazine described by a former editor as the "Bible of the avant-garde" (Eastman 302). After it was shut-down by the government during World War I, the magazine was succeed by The Liberator in 1918, a Communist organ, which in turn, was followed by New Masses (NM). From its first issue in 1926 NM became a leading literary voice of social-political protest, the kind of magazine Burnshaw sought. …