The "Dynamo" School of Poets

Author(s): Estelle Gershgoren Novak

Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Autumn, 1970), pp. 526-539
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207635
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THE DYNAMO SCHOOL OF POETS

Estelle Gershgoren Novak

If they have not been wholly ignored, the radical p

have usually been dismissed as naive, incompeten
serious consideration. Yet whatever their weakn
represent an important phenomenon in Ameri
and, in fact, they often were successful in thei
political ideology and poetic technique. As Mor
the June 1934 issue of Poetry,1 one of the mor
recent crop of left-wing magazines was Dynamo: A
tionary Poetry, whose purpose was to forge a
out of the proletarian movement.2 Calling for i
flected the new social sensibility, the magazine
exciting of the leftist poets. Among those who
were Sol Funaroff, Kenneth Fearing, and Murie
whom I have singled out for discussion, as well
Edwin Rolfe, Haakon Chevalier, Ben Maddow
William Pillin, Hector Bella, and Michael Gold.
Although Dynamo published no formal manif
explicit statement of purpose, it did, in a sense
As its name indicated, it manifested an interest
than static poetry, thereby rejecting Imagism, and

1 Morton Dauwen Zabel, "Recent Magazines," P

1934), 168.
2Dynamo began publication in January 1934 and ended with the Sep-
tember/December issue of 1936. It was suspended between September 1934
and April 1935. Its place of publication was New York.
3 Ben Maddow sometimes used the pseudonym David Wolff and is often
referred to by that name in the New Masses.

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source for imagery, thereby associating itself with Futurism.4 Though
it printed the British Marxists, Auden and Day Lewis, it regarded
them, for the most part, as traditionalists and found its function in di-
recting the proletarian sensibility by means of a new poetic technique.
The rhythms of Gregory's and Rukeyser's poems remind one of
Hart Crane, and along with the Fearing-like infusion of advertising
slogans and names there are Audenesque satirical lines. Echoes of
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in Joseph Freeman and Sol Funaroff
remind us that there persisted a tendency to be imitative, even of
poets whom these writers might have rejected as non-revolutionary.
In his poem "What the Thunder Said: A Fire Sermon," Funaroff
imitated not only the title but the manner of Eliot's poem, turning
it into a revolutionist's satiric comment on capitalist society. Yet
despite initial formal influences from such "decadent" poets, many
of the younger poets moved in an exploratory direction far away from
Eliot and his methods.
The poets on the left intended to use what they learned from
Eliot for their own purposes, but to do this they needed to create
a new voice that would describe not only the decay of civilization
which Eliot had made the landmark of his poetry, but also the decay
of capitalism and the triumph of socialism. The predominant type
of leftist poem in these years was the propaganda piece based on a
rhetoric of slogans or flat prose statements in a structure of broken
lines and relatively free verse. But, for the most part, the Dynamo
poets did not rely on this kind of poem; rather, in an attempt to
reproduce the machine-like qualities of the city, they tended to mix
traditional with industrial imagery. Fearing accomplished this by
juxtaposing names of industrial magnates and advertising slogans in
the line pattern, Funaroff and Rukeyser with their imagery. In addi-
tion, Funaroff and Rukeyser occasionally blend an external stream
of visual images with the internal imagery of consciousness, a counter-
point of surrealism and social realism.
The left-wing poet confronted the problem of making poems out
of the economic crisis by referring to the Marxist dialectic. The con-
crete emotional expression of that dialectic seemed to be best ex-
pressed in the film, and particularly in the montage technique.5

4Actually, in his introduction to his brother Sol's posthumously pub-

lished poems, Exile from a Future Time (New York, 1943), Uri Funaroff
refers to the "Dynamo School of modern poets."
5 Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker, used the montage technique

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Recognizing the possibility for immediate impact, for the transposi-
tion of the abstract into the concrete, the poet tried to transfer the
visual language of the film into the language of poetry. The film
suggested a method, but the newspapers, Walt Whitman, party
slogans, statistics, and street conversation provided most of the ma-
terial for the Marxist poet's miniature dialectic. As a poet of the left
in an era of economic disaster, he selected materials that best ex-
pressed the Marxist attitudes he espoused. But, unlike the novelist
or journalist, he could not simply report the most recent coal strike
and present it as socialist realism. He had to find a way to make
political reality into poetry. Because of this demand the poet much
more than the novelist of the decade was concerned with form. Yet
the nature of his material was prosaic and he often became prosaic
in his poems, adapting novelistic techniques for use in poetry when-
ever he could and transforming the language of science, sociology,
and economics into poetic statement.

Sol Funaroff, who grew up in the slums of New York's East

Side, was the only poet of the Dynamo group who was a proletarian
by necessity and not by choice. Having come with his family from
Russia at a young age, he was also the only immigrant. He lived into
his thirty-second year (1911-42) and endured poverty throughout his
life. Active as both a political and a literary figure, he was to many
other poets of the period an inspiration from the streets. Whereas
the other poets often had to search out material for the poems they
wrote from an experience of poverty and misery into which they
thrust themselves, Funaroff found all that at home.6
During his short career as a poet, Funaroff published in a num-
ber of magazines under three pseudonyms, Charles Henry Newman,
Steve Foster, and Sil Vnarov. But only two volumes of his poems
were published: in 1938, The Spider and the Clock, and posthu-
mously in 1943, Exile from a Future Time. Many of Funaroff's poems
in his first book are simply a young man's unsuccessful verses. Yet

as a dialectical instrument of propaganda. His lectures on the film were not

published until after most of his films were made, but magazines in the United
States such as The Left published articles on Eisenstein, montage, and the
relationship of film to proletarian and revolutionary culture as early as 1931.
See S. S., "A Working-Class Cinema for America?," The Left: A Quarterly
Review of Radical and Experimental Art, I, i (1931), 73.
6 Uri Funaroff, "My Brother, Sol Funaroff," introduction to Exile from a
Future Time, p. ix.

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even here he writes a poetry that is of his time and class. His brother
referred to him as the leader of the Dynamo school; the flyleaf of his
first book cited him as "a leading member of the new school of revo-
lutionary American poets which includes Kenneth Fearing, Muriel
Rukeyser, Edwin Rolfe, Alfred Hayes, David Wolff and many
others."7 But if he belonged to this group of "revolutionary" poets,
he did so by virtue of the risks he took in his poems and the origi-
nality of his attempts, whether they were successful or not.
He wrote on the standard subject matter of the New Masses
poets, the factory, the unemployed, the worker, Karl Marx, and
poverty. The second poem in The Spider and the Clock, "Factory
Night," successfully combines nature and machinery for a comment
on the invasion of the factory into the stillness of night:

Smooth as oil the factory night

pours into grooves of the company town
and down the shafts of the iron mill
whose engines, cushioned in beds of grease,
purr like iron beasts in sleep. (p. 11)

There is a certain awkwardness in the phrasing and still the use of

clichE, but Funaroff is obviously trying to deal with the experience
of the machine on its own grounds. The mill in the poem becomes
a force of destruction, the place of exploitation for "the tired limbs
of laborers" and "leaves behind/ a town of clapboard skeletons and
carbon dust" (p. 12). In these lines Funaroff has substituted the literal
for the imagistic, perhaps for the sake of impact or perhaps out of
rhetorical habit. But they do not work as effectively as the earlier
ones which make their start from the image to comment on the literal
fact that the image suggests. The mingling of the literal details from
factory life with mechanistic imagery has a mixed effect in much of
Funaroff's poetry. Because Muriel Rukeyser gives it the aura of fic-
tional narrative, she is more successful with the literal statement.
Funaroff does not, and therefore his poems often give rise to the
simply rhetorical rather than the unified poetic line. But at other
times his rhetoric is the soul of the poem and makes the political
quality effective when it is placed against the concrete description of
events. He is most successful when he uses the rhetorical line to
synthesize, to write the "dialectical" poem of protest.

7 In the first edition of The Spider and the Clock (New York, 1938).
Page references in the text are to this edition.

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 In his poem "What the Thunder Said: A Fire Sermon," printed
with an epigraph from Eliot's The Waste Land and the subtitle "A
Cinematic Poem," he combined influences from Eliot and the cine-
matic montage with mechanical and surrealistic imagery. His version
of Eliot's citations from the Upanishads reads:

The Thorthunder says:

(rumblin crumblin)
Dal
Da! Dal
All power to the Soviets!

The Spring Blows Over The Steppes. (p. 28)

He tried to mix the spring, stars, and water with tractors, blast fur-
naces, and the October Revolution to get a cinematic effect, as for
example in this passage:

In October
lightning ripples the windwaved wheat-
great streak of silver whistling scythe!
And tractors bloom in the wheatfields!
They rumble
They speak
Gigant! (p. 28)

In addition Funaroff tried to create the industrial image out of

natural phenomena, the machine turned into a cloud, or as he has it,
"an electromagnetic sunset."
In the last lines of the poem he turns his imagery into a sur-
realistic montage of the coming of the new socialist order:

and the sun like an executed head falls

and the whole sky bleeds
dripping over church and skyscraper
and arms like hammers strike stars
forge new worlds shoot upwards
yes! (p. 32)

What began as T. S. Eliot-turned-revolutionary becomes by the end

of the poem a surreal and futuristic vision of the revolution in great
applause and thunder. The listing of events in visual form gives evi-
dence for Funaroff's assertion that he was trying to use the cinematic
montage:

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 and the world in the embrace of the flaming flood
and the hammer heard clanging
clanging upon an anvil
changing and shaping world October
and they march and demonstrate. (p. 31)

The flood and the hammer act as visual images for the screening of
events that culminate in demonstration and revolution. Funaroff
shouts more loudly than Eliot, in the manner of the revolutionary,
and he depends more on the quick visual effect than on the rich,
well conceived image.
Funaroff's posthumous poems, Exile from a Future Time, are
perhaps more varied than those in his first book. He begins with a
series of Negro songs, adapting what he sees as the Negro blues into
songs of social protest. Many of the other poems in the volume are
personal lyrics, which, in their prosaic lines, are for the most part
unsuccessful as the simple love poems they are meant to be. Funaroff
wrote better when he stayed with political materials and personalized
them by his experience in the city. His real contribution as a poet
was with his first book, with "What the Thunder Said," "Dniepros-
troi," and a few other poems. But his main value for the history of
American poetry in the thirties is not in his poems themselves but
in the kinds of poems he tried to write, the kinds of experiment he
turned to. Where he failed, he failed because of bad writing of a
kind to be found everywhere on the left in that decade. And where
he succeeded, he succeeded not in polished lines but in the kinds of
imagery he created, the way in which he welded the political subject
to its needs-the factory to factory image, the revolution to industrial
montage, and the Negro blues to songs of social protest. Funaroff
was the perfect image of the poet of his era, a boy from the tene-
ments, who plunged into political activity as editor and journalist and
tried to make poems of political commitment out of his personal
experience.

A more accomplished poet is Kenneth Fearing, for whom both

the right and the left of the thirties reserved a certain admiration. He
was not a worker-poet like Funaroff; yet he was referred to by the
New Masses' reviewer, Edward Dahlberg, as a poet for workers. Born
in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of an attorney, he did not spend his
childhood in the tenements, but his poems roam the city streets and
never leave the urban environment of Chicago and New York, into
which he put himself by choice.

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 Since the thirties Fearing has been regarded as a minor poet, but
during that decade he was regarded as a powerful satirist and an
ingenious experimenter, especially in his attempts to reproduce
American speech in poetry and in his transformations of the material
of advertisements and movies. The Marxist critics looked for precisely
this kind of experimentation in the American revolutionary poem.
Kenneth Burke wrote in a review of Poems: "An inverted Whitman,
Fearing scans the country with a statistical eye; but where Whitman
sought to pile up a dithyrambic catalogue of glories, Fearing gives us
a satirically seasoned catalogue of burdens."8 Burke's description of
Fearing's "catalogue of burdens" is a precise analysis of the kind of
influence the Whitmanesque tradition had on the poets of the left.
Fearing began to exploit the urban environment for satirical
purposes in his first volume of poetry, Angel Arms, in 1929. His man-
ner there was that of the twenties, a lively, amusing comment on the
urban scene. With Poems his stance became more obviously that of a
revolutionary commenting on a decaying society. To make the poem
understandable to the masses, Fearing came to believe, the poet had
to exploit popular culture. Reflecting Marxist poetics, he wrote that
the poem's meaning disclosed itself "at ordinary reading tempo."9
Fearing began early to demonstrate the way in which he was to work.
"Jack Knuckles Falters," for example, is a poem modeled on a prin-
ciple similar to that of the Newsreel and Camera Eye sections of
Dos Passos' USA:

WILL RUMANIAN PRINCE WED AGAIN?

Was keeping bad companions against the advice of my moth
and companions.
How I

WISHES HE COULD HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE

Wish I could live my life over again. If I
Could only be given another chance I would show the world
to be a man, but I.... 1

The method of counterpointing the personal disaster with the news-

8 Kenneth Burke, "Two Kinds of Against," review of E. E. Cummings'

No Thanks and Kenneth Fearing's Poems, The New Republic, LXXXIII
(June 26, 1935), 198.
9 See Weldon Kees, "Fearing's Collected Poems," review of Kenneth
Fearing's Collected Poems, Poetry, LIX (January 1941), 268.
10 Kenneth Fearing, "Jack Knuckles Falters," Collected Poems (New
York, 1940), p. 11. Page references are to this volume.

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paper version of the affair will help Fearing later to deliver a specifically
political message or a satiric comment on the political or economic
apparatus of society.
In "American Rhapsody (1)" from Poems, instead of contrast-
ing the newspaper headline with the personal story, Fearing wrote
the poem in the language of the newspaper, turning the phrases
ironically against themselves:

That breadline,
Salvation before coffee and rolls.
"Last night a number of you gentlemen hurried through the
banquet and dashed around to the mission next door for
another slice of bread.
Is that gratitude? Is that decency? Certified scabies? Starvation
common, or TB preferred?" (p. 43)

In his poems "Program" and "Ad," Fearing used this technique, not
only with newspaper language, but with the advertisement, the
theater program, and the popular song. "Denouement," which ap-
peared in Poems, is his best political poem-a long piece that com-
bines the general comment of the politician and revolutionary with
that of the satiric poet. It opens with long oratorical lines like these:

Desire of millions, become more real than warmth and breath

and strength and bread;
Clock, point to the decisive hour and, hour without name when
stacked and waiting murder fades, dissolves, stay forever as the
world grows new .... (p. 68)

These lines resemble the typical left-wing poet's propaganda

statement, but there is something different here. It is the specific
image (murder dissolving, clocks pointing to the hour) that offsets
the political generalization. And from here Fearing moves into his
inimitable manner with the use of the rhetorical question so com-
mon to the Dynamo poems:

Objection, overruled, exception, proceed:

Was yours the voice heard singing one night in a flyblown, soot-
beamed, lost and forgotten Santa Fe saloon? Later bel-
lowing in rage? And you boiled up a shirt in a Newark
furnished room? Then you found another job, and
pledged not to organize, or go on strike? (p. 69)

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After the rhetorical questions, the catalogue begins, combined with
the archetypal story of the lost life:

You, lodge member, protestant, crossborn male, the placenta dis-

colored, at birth, by syphilis, you, embryo four inches
deep in the seventh month .... (p. 70)

Fearing's true appeal as a revolutionary poet was his ability to

combine realistic description and political comment in the form of a
readable poem that lost nothing of its quality as poem while it
gained in propaganda value. He died in 1961 still very much the
same kind of poet. His Collected Poems in 1941 showed some lines
changed to omit direct references to Communists or to the left, but
the poems themselves and their intent are changed little by these
omissions or alterations." It is doubtful that Fearing would have
written such poetry had he not been associated with the Marxist
camp in the thirties. His satire would have been less effective with-
out that ideology, and certainly the Marxist literary critic would have
been left without a lively and effective revolutionary poet both to
praise and to criticize.

Muriel Rukeyser arrived late on the scene. She was born in 1913
in New York City. Though the stock market crash occurred in her
senior year in high school, she went on to Vassar, where she stayed
two years. Soon afterward she joined the political and literary left.
Her interests were various (statistics, film, photography, and biog-
raphy), and her poems have continued to reflect the variety of her
career. Her Gauley Bridge poems in U.S. 1 produced a film script,
and the Gibbs poem in A Turning Wind produced a biography of
Willard Gibbs.

Rukeyser's poems reflect economic and moral decay and the

personal disaster which came in the wake of the depression. They
are public poems as are Kenneth Fearing's, but their concerns are
less impersonal. By using bits of conversation rather than newspaper
reports, she leads the reader into public catalogues through personal
entrance halls. Less prosaic than Fearing and more skillful than
Funaroff, she followed them in adapting montage effects and surreal-
istic techniques.
Her first book, Theory of Flight, begins with "Poem out of
Childhood," a saga of experience both personal and public and of

11 Kees, "Fearing's Collected Poems," p. 268.

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the kind so common to the earlier poets of the thirties. Here there
is a slight trace of Eliot's mythic manner:

We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil

the bough's gold shade advancing forever with us,

but she goes on:

Not Sappho, Sacco.

Rebellion pioneered among our lives

and she gives the poem a touch of the violent lives of the period:

We sat on the steps of the unrented house

raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold
creating again how they removed his glasses
and philosophically slit his throat.12

Again, in "The Lynchings of Jesus," Section II, "The Committee-

Room," Rukeyser mixed the personal with the impersonal, the per-
sonal conversation in the manner of Eliot with the ironic public
comment in the impersonal manner of Fearing:

What did you do in school today, my darling?

Tamburlaine rode over Genghis had a sword
holding riot over Henry V Emperor of and
the city of Elizabeth the tall sails

and

We are powerful now: we vote

death to Sacco a man's name
and Vanzetti a blood-brother; death
to Tom Mooney, or a wall, no matter;
poverty to Piers Plowman, shrieking anger
to Shelley, a cough and Fanny to Keats ...
thus to D. H. Lawrence. (pp. 45-46)

Continuing to use the mechanical materials she had begun to

work with in "Gyroscope," she tried, in "The Structure of the Plane,"
not to create an imagery out of the machinery itself, but to objectify

12Muriel Rukeyser, "Poem out of Childhood," Theory of Flight (New

Haven, 1935), p. 11.

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the actual mechanism in the poem: "The final exhaust stroke serves
to release the gases,/allowing the piston to scavenge the cylinder"
(p. 59). This same kind of objectivity also appears in her political
commentary. Allowing ordinary life to play against public catastrophe,
she makes her political comments in fictionalized accounts of Sacco
and Vanzetti, the Scotsboro boys, or Tom Mooney.
"Boy with his Hair Cut Short" in U.S. 1 used objective descrip-
tion as a kind of silent film script to give substance to the simple
fictionalized story of a boy preparing to look for a job:

He sits at the table, head down, the young clear neck

exposed,
watching the drugstore sign from the tail of his eye
tattoo, neon, until the eye blears, while his
solicitous tall sister, simple in blue, bending
behind him, cuts his hair with her cheap shears.13

But "The Disease," which was about death, not the continual failure
of life, uses a more statistical manner, not less loving in detail, but a
detail more scientifically careful. The poem is a conversation of
doctor with patient. The disease is silicosis, common among miners
and a particularly popular subject for the left writer of the period.
Rukeyser simply let the facts fall as on a doctor's chart, without
comment or exaggerated image:

That indicates the progress in ten months' time.

And now, this year-short breathing, solid scars
even over the ribs, thick on both sides.
Blood vessels shut. Model conglomeration

and ended with ironic understatement: "Does silicosis cause death?/

Yes, sir" (p. 28).
She was probably most successful as a social protest poet in
poems of this kind, where the objectivity and the sparseness of
language created an immediacy of effect. The film montage gave the
same sense of immediacy in "Gauley Bridge." The opening stanza
in the poem characterizes a nearly empty one-block town in terms
of three visual images:

13 Muriel Rukeyser, "Boy with his Hair Cut Short," Waterlily Fire:
Poems 1935-1962 (New York, 1962), p. 38. All subsequent page references
are to this volume.

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 Camera at the crossing sees the city
a street of wooden walls and empty windows,
the doors shut handless in the empty street,
and the deserted Negro standing on the corner. (p. 23)

The montage focuses on the Negro deserted in an empty town and

on the empty lives of a few people measured by the symbolic empti-
ness around them. In the remainder of the poem the lists of people
and things continue to support the original montage. Apart from the
last stanza, which is rhetorical question and statement, the poem rests
solely on the film technique and acts as a capsule film script in itself.
In A Turning Wind Rukeyser moved on to biographical poems,
portraits of Gibbs and A. P. Ryder, among others. She flashed forth
a life in a poem in much the same way as she did the film montage
of the town in "Gauley Bridge." Making the chaos of his painting
the core of the Ryder poem and systems the core of the Gibbs poem,
she created a unity out of the central focus of the individual's life.
Metaphors in the poem come so directly out of the mathematical-
scientific world of Gibbs that as we read, we perceive Gibbs as sym-
bol as well as Gibbs as man. For example, in this passage we begin
with the actual Gibbs "driving/ his sister's coach in the city," but
in the same line we are moved by the metaphor into a world of
physics:

. . knowing the
rose of direction loosing its petals down
atoms and galaxies. Diffusion's absolute. (p. 55)

In such poems Rukeyser uses the prose lines which are so much a
part of the objectivity of her political poems to probe more deeply
the inner lives of her subjects.
In "Ryder," she does much the same thing as she had done in
the Gibbs poem. Her listing of objects in the following lines gives us
a sense of the chaos that she creates by means of metaphor in a
later line: "In his room/ wreckage of boxes, propped-leg, easel, couch,
ashes, coal-keg, shells/ bronzed tarnished coffee-pot, books, paints,
piled broken furniture" (p. 57). This is Ryder's external world and
Rukeyser's objective world. But for Ryder the inner man, she gives
us the metaphor of Ryder as "fog walking through rain" immediately
followed by more specifics about his dress, with Ryder becoming his
paintings in the final lines:

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 His head that was moon the center of the storm.
His boulders that were eyes washed by the drift of ocean. (p. 59)

Because the film technique is more suited to the pointing out of the
relationship between concrete fact and general comment, Rukeyser
does not use montage here. In these poems her general comments
become metaphors and her concrete statements remain what they
are-description.
In the "Elegies" the relationship between inner and outer worlds
is perfected by the balancing of metaphor against a prose statement
made in the first person. For example, "First Elegy: Rotten Lake"
begins with "As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered ...."
But the second line alters the form by the intrusion of what the "I"
remembers in a metaphor of inner and outer chaos, "the wrecked
season, haunted by plans of salvage,/ snow, the closed door, footsteps
and resurrections .. ." (p. 89). Metaphors are used in this elegy
and in others partly as direct images of social disaster and partly as
surreal sensations, as in the following lines:

... and the stilltide water

was floor of evening and magnetic light and
reflection of wish, the black-haired beast with my eyes
walking beside me. (p. 89)

The lines above begin conventionally enough, but by the time

we get to "reflection of wish" and "the black-haired beast" we are
in a surreal inner world far beyond the still water. Rukeyser combines
such lines with pure prose statement such as: "There were no mis-
givings because there was no choice" or lines that read at first as
pure statement and turn into metaphor like: "When you have left
the river you will hear the war." But later in the poem the "beast"
of the early lines becomes more than surreal image; it becomes a
symbol of economic need.

The poet's transformation of prose realities into meaningful

social commentary and good poetry was the goal of the Marxist poet
during the depression decade in America. All of these poets worked
out of a revolutionary milieu and a world in the midst of economic
chaos. All lived to see the beginnings of World War II and both
Rukeyser and Fearing to see its end and beyond. The thirties left
its mark on their poetry, and it was the thirties of the New Masses,
the John Reed Clubs, and the Communist Party. Like the literary

538 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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criticism of the Marxists, this poetry groped for new solutions. Poet
as well as critic tried to find ways to balance the new materials of
Marxist ideology and depression reality with a commensurate poetic
form. If, as I have said earlier, these three poets went back to bour-
geois forms to create revolutionary poetry, they did so with every in-
tention of altering, adding to, and reexamining those forms. Because
they went elsewhere for their materials, outside of literature itself
(which had been the preoccupation of the twenties), they found in
the film, in the streets, and in the language of the people new forms
more compatible with these new materials.
It was in the thirties that poets began writing, more consciously
than ever before, a poetry that took its roots in the language of
American life. The Marxist aesthetic combined the demand for an
"American" poetry derived from Whitman with the Soviet demand
for revolutionary literature. American and revolutionary strains to-
gether created a poetry that was peculiarly the product of the left-
wing poets of that decade. The "beat generation" of the fifties and
sixties had its early leaders in two poets who wrote for the left in
the thirties-Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth-and they car-
ried the heritage of those years with them, writing the new social
protest poetry of the "beats." Robert Bly's current interest in trans-
lations of the Spanish and South American poets had its beginnings
in the interest of the late thirties in Pablo Neruda and Federico
Garcia Lorca as political poets. Much of the experimentation begun
in those years to serve ideology and political sentiment has continued
to be of value to American poetry in the decades that have followed.
There is little doubt that American poetry was altered by Marxism,
by the depression, and by those who lived through the decade in all
its variety, whether they emerged cleansed or disillusioned from its
chaos.

University of Southern California

DYNAMO SCHOOL | 539

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