There are probably a lot of technical errors in Giovannitti’s
poems.[1] I didn’t notice. And perhaps that is one of the tests of
great poetry,—not the faults that you can’t find because they’re not
there, but the faults that will not be discovered. Something else
absorbs you.
The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a
new sort of song. And doubtless because of this song it will be many
years before we see his greatness. For the song that he sings is not a
pleasant song. It is the song of the people as he learned it in the
Lawrence strike and hummed it over in the jails of Salem. He and his
song are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We
do not comprehend the labor problem of the unskilled, just as we do
not comprehend the I. W. W. that has come out of it. A poet has arisen
to explain.
Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough.
Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He
is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of
work—you can’t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no
aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people
behind the work—active or idle, skilled or not—“Plebs, Populace,
People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.” He cries the awakening of that
great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because
earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common
attribute—the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation:
Think! If your brain will but extend
As far as what your hands have done,
If but your reason will descend
As deep as where your feet have gone,
The walls of ignorance shall fall
That stood between you and your world….
Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn,
Crouched at your feet the world lies still—
It has no power but your brawn,
It knows no wisdom but your will.
Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood,
Nothing there is to live and do,
There is no man, there is no god,
There is not anything but you.
Against him Giovannitti finds the world—the world even of his own
kind, bound in the chains of the past. The police, the law, the
Church, another age shackling this, he has met them all in
Massachusetts, arrayed against even the first steps toward his
industrial democracy. The business of his verse is to destroy. In
_The Cage_—the prisoner’s pen in which he stood for murder—he deals
with the mummy of authority. In _The Walker_ he has painted the prison
as no man, not even Wilde, has done. And the Church—even the Christ
whom so many socialists are confessing that they may be numbered with
the sheep—that also he denies. Christ, the heavy-laden carpenter, was
still a man of peace. Giovannitti has his own sermon, “The Sermon on
the Common”: “Blessed are the strong in freedom’s spirit; for theirs
is the kingdom of the earth.”
Materialistic—like all these socialists? Giovannitti has his answer
ready for you: “While happiness be not our goal, but simply the way to
get there.”
Neither materialism nor happiness is likely to trouble the average
American. What bothers him is “violence.” And there is no disguising
the fact that violence is an essential part of the I. W. W. and its
faith. Love is as great a part, of course; but hate must spring just
as quickly from the cruelty of the world of the few as love from the
brotherhood of the world of the many. Giovannitti and his friends want
something and they want it badly. They are ready to take it peaceably:
Giovannitti pictures the spirit of Helen Keller as the Christ of
loving forgiveness—the only true Christ—offering peace to the
grinder of the faces of the poor. But, if love and forgiveness fail,
there is another savior waiting, and a violent savior:
… The sombre one whose brow
Is seared by all the fires and ne’er will bow
Shall come forth, both his hands upon the hilt.
Whatever its future, the I. W. W. has accomplished one tremendously
big thing—a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and
violence and sabotage. And that is the individual awakening of
“illiterates” and “scum” to an original, personal conception of
society and the realization of the dignity and the rights of their
part in it. They have learned more than class-consciousness; they have
learned consciousness of self. The I. W. W. is making the “wop” into a
thinker. And that is what Giovannitti wrote in his _Proem_ when he
said of his own verses:
They are the blows of my own sledge
Against the walls of my own jail.
[1] _Arrows in the Gale._ By Arturo Giovannitti. The Hillacre
Book House.