The poems which appear in this volume are a contribution to the
propaganda and the art of the new culture. "Above all things," writes
Chaplin, "I don't want anyone to try to make me out a 'poet'--because
I'm not. I don't think much of these esthetic creatures who condescend
to stoop to our level that we may have the blessings of culture. We'll
manage to make our own--do it in our own way, and stagger through
somehow. . . . These are tremendous times, and sooner or later someone
will come along big enough to sound the right note, and it will be a
rebel note." It is that note which Chaplin has sought to strike, and
that he has succeeded will be the verdict of anyone who has read over
the poems.
Chaplin's work speaks for itself. Some of the poems were written in
Leavenworth Prison and published in the prison paper. Others were
written during the tedious months of the Chicago trial, when the men
were kept in the Cook County jail. Chaplin has had ample time to work
them out. Christmas, 1921, was the fifth consecutive Christmas that
he has spent in prison. The poems bear the impress of the bars, but
they ring with the glad vigor of a free spirit that bars cannot
contain.
The reader of Chaplin's prison poems unavoidably makes three mental
comments:
1. When poems so reserved, so vigorous; so penetrating, so melodious,
so beautiful, come from behind jail bars, it is high time that
thinking men and women awoke to the fate that awaits bold dreamers and
singers under the present order in the United States.
2. Men are not silenced when steel doors clang behind them. Free
spirits are as free behind the bars as they are under the open sky.
The jail, as a gag, is impotent. While it may master the body, it
cannot contain the soul.
3. The new order in America is already finding its voice. Although it
is so young, and so immature, it is speaking with an accent of gifted
authority.
Chaplin is not a dangerous man--except as his ideas are dangerous to
the existing order of society. His presence in the penitentiary, under
a twenty year sentence, indicates how dangerous those ideas are
considered by the masters of American public life. Rich those masters
are--fabulously rich; and strong they may be, yet so insecure do they
feel themselves that they are constrained to hold in prison this
dreamer and singer of the new social order.
Chaplin, in prison, like Debs in prison, is doing his work. He is
resisting the encroachments of those jail demons--hate, bitterness,
revenge; he is holding his mind on the goal--a newer, better social
order; he is keeping his vision of nature, of humanity, of
brotherhood, of courage, of love, of beauty,--clear and bright.
Chaplin, the man, is in jail; but Chaplin the poet and singer is
roaming wherever books go; wherever papers are read, and wherever
comrades repeat verses to one another in the flickering light of the
evening fire.