The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1927-01-08

All OF these poems express sympathy for the PRO
letariat all in protest against a society that
breeds poverty, hunger, and pain yet possesses
revolutionary insight philosophy They are all
part of that movement that marked the rise Of new
forms and the slow decay of old ideals in the lat
ter part OF the eighteenth century They are in
volt against things aristocratic. They despse too,
the ACOUSTIC ideal The lower classes have cap
tured their sympathy. At one time it was Rous-
seau, at another Paine, who believed in the future
of democracy. For Paine, for Mary Wollstone-
craft and the Utilitarians who grew into school
of philosophic and economic significance, private
property virtue instead of a vice.. Yet despite
their philosophic defense of privateproperty these
thinkers were part Of the democratic movement
have described They had sympathy for the
commouer 1t not classconscious sympathy,
to be sure, but sympathy that was significant in
contrast to the contempt with which the older ars
tocracies had regarded the toier. Out of this
ment sprang the explanatory enthusiasm of William
Blake, the English poet, who, donning q red cap,
declared himself liberty oy-'the shape OF my
head makes me so"-and who later arrested
for crying Damn the king and you tool" when he
tried to eject an ofcious soldier from his gardens.
Burns, too; and the early Wordsworth and Cow
per, the young Southey and Coleridge, were ex-
pressiye Of the same reaction. The poet moved
often to exciting not ecstatc and revolutionary
madness. Cowper, with all his pious skeptcism,
was ny the RSFOiuttOH, anu cdlte0 IL won
derful period in the history of mankind" Burns
was beautifully dynamic In his enthusiasm 1t was
he who sent guns from captured smuggling YES
sci 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 Mans Man for a. That
was written at this time, most likely in 1889,
although it not published until 1871. Words
worth gay in his early Righteousness. To be
alive was good, but to be alive was very heaven
such the sentiment of the early Wordsworth
who caressed love in those days wwdth the careless
ness of a young Lothario AS late as 1884 he wrote
to his friend Mathews:
81 am of that odious class of men called
democrats and of that class 1 shall forever con-
tinue."
In another place he wrote with equal fervor:
Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders
of every specie. think, must necessarily coun-
teract the progress of human Improvement
hence it follows that 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
sentimental is not to be argued. 1t was a
sentimentality, however, that persuasive and,
at the time, influential Burns poem Mans a
Man for a. That, was expressive OF attitude that
not to be found in the aristocratic and bour-
geos literature that had preceded Godsmiths lines:
III fares the land, 10 Fastening ills prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them, breath has made:
But bold peasantry, their countrys PRIDE
When once destroyed, never be supplied"
while not revolutionary in either form 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 eff
fusion, since the days of jeremiah.
Our poetry, today, then, is chiefly poetry OF pro-
test instead OF poetry of revolution. As poetry Of
protest is is adulterated with sugar phrase
and lachrymose attachment Dronke's hines:
"And for your blood of God demand
Grim penalty"
or those Of Heine:
"A curse to the king, curse TO his coffin,