Poets of the Left

...These aberrations notwithstanding, Wheelwright could be very serious when dealing with the things he really cared about poetry, religion and politics Never at home in Boston society, he came to believe that "capitalism had driven the most valuable social element [namely, poets and professionals] out of the upper classes ' After he discovered Trotsky, he worked hard to promote socialism, which, he felt, would help the American proletariat reach goals that had eluded it He taught, gave speeches, wrote articles Briefly he strove to promote a united front of Communists and Socialists, but he was never a Stalinist, the Communist Party's second-rate thinking disturbed him "They grind out the dialectic just as the Papal court grinds out its dialectic 1 never cared for canned food " His Marxist friends were also shocked by his Christian convictions Like TS Eliot, he had converted from the family Unitarianism to a mystic Anglo-Catholicism Were it not for the sufferings of Christ, he insisted, he would not be a Socialist...

...Wheelwright was a scion of upper-class Boston His ancestors were as distinguished as the Lowells and probably more eccentric The poet lived most of his life with his mother on Beacon Street, " in a house decorated with Chinese vases and screens from a family trading Empire " His father, the descendant of a famous Puritan divine, was an influential Boston architect who designed many of the city's museums, public buildings and hospitals, as well as the bizarre castle that houses the Harvard Lampoon The father's suicide in 1912 had a devastating effect on the 15-year-old Jack and made him a loner, for all his political involvement Wheelwright's mother was a Brooks, one of colonial Boston's wealthiest merchant families Despite the family fortune's decline, Wheelwright was never obliged to work With a patrician disdain for conventions, he sometimes attended Socialist rallies in a tuxedo, insisting, "It's only the honor that is due [the working class] " Wald reports that Wheelwright "once showed up in a bread line wearing his racoon coat A policeman approached and asked, 'What are you doing here7' 'I'm a poet,' he explained " Wheelwright had an exhibitionist streak He interrupted a reading of Allen Tate's by suddenly crawling under the carpet, and once was expelled from Yad-do for taking statues and bananas into the bathtub with him...

...Readers wishing to judge Wheelwright's verse for themselves can now do so, for Alvin H Rosenfeld's edition of The Collected Poems of John Wheelwright (New Directions, 278pp ,$10 00) has been reissued The neglect of so passionate and innovative a voice is hard to account for True, the poetry has its difficulties It is didactic in a very New Eng-landy manner common to John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes and both male Lowells It is often replete with abstruse references to theology Works like "Com-u-nasty Peace" and "You-U S -Us" are political vaudeville (although Shelley wrote in this vein, too), and such modes go in and out of fashion What is timeless about Wheelwright is his craft and conviction In contrast to many modernists, he believed that poems made things happen "The main point is not what noise poetry makes, but how it makes you think and act-not what you make of it, but what it makes of you ". His three themes are personal religious faith, the proletarian struggle and his own development His best poetry welds them into a whole "Bread-Word Giver,' a tribute to his holy Puritan ancestor, "schismatic from schismatics," is reminiscent of Robert Lowell's early work, as is the sonnet beginning "An East Wind asperges Boston with Lynn's sulphurous brine/Under the bridge of turrets my father built " Both have Lowell's burning intensity of language and ideas-and they predate him by many years...

...Shelley, who was too much like thee, O Wind The pard-like spirit, who said that he was pard-like Spirits who did not call themselves bad names in public print, as T S Eliot did Classicist, Royalist, Anglo-Catholic, long names for the four letter word, a snob Why, when a writer totters out of fashion are we reminded how his life is sad...

...The author believes that Wheelwright's efforts to join such disparate strains were artistically fruitful "Contradiction is not inherently harmful to art and may even be a spur to imaginative feats His published books of poetry provide evidence that the Great Depression era inspired fresh attempts at creating myths and imaginative worlds that elevated his work to a higher plane " Wald goes a long way toward achieving one of the principal purposes of The Revolutionary Imagination, "to restore Wheelwright's reputation as a poet of note ". The case for Sherry Mangan is more problematic "Despite several remarkable poems and stones and an admirable life as a professional revolutionist," Wald observes, "he succeeded in reconciling literature with politics only in his journalism In poetry he rarely achieved such an integration, indeed, his life was characterized by alternate swings between total commitment to politics and total commitment to literature " Readers of The Revolutionary Imagination will have to take the worth of Mangan's fictional accomplishments on faith (or look up the defunct periodicals where they appeared), as for the quoted poems, alas, they do not justify Wald's praise Moreover, the "admirable life" seems sadly wasted...

...Writers & Writing POETS OF THE LEFT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THE LIVES and verse of two almost-forgotten modern poets, John Wheelwright (1897-1940) and Sherry Mangan (1904-1961), are analyzed by Alan M Wald in The Revolutionary Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 288 pp , $28 00) Both were Harvard-educated New Engenders who became Trotskyites during the Depression and devoted themselves to combining literature with political ardor Wald points out that the yoking "of Marxist politics and modernist literary techniques is nowhere acknowledged in any of the histories of American poetry Yet this blend did exist and was widespread These poets represent but two examples of an entire literary tendency that has been virtually forgotten ". Before his death at age 43 in a hit-and-run accident, Wheelwright published three highly original collections of verse Rock and Shell (1933), a sonnet sequence entitled Mirrors of Venus (1938), and Political Self-Portrait (1940) A fourth book, already announced as forthcoming when he died, did not in fact appear until years later Wheelwright's style, praised by such critics as Kenneth Burke and R P Blackmur, was an amalgam of the neo-Metaphysical and the Romantic-at once thoughtful and musical He did not sacrifice artistic integrity to ideological sloganeering...

...The stars and planets weary of ether wind and weary of their own, their endless song Their praise of heaven thrills not as when it rolled forth when the sky was young, ere Ezra Pound proclaimed Pianos are percussion instruments And can poets hunger for the wind no longer as hungered spirits, gone a different way...

...Wheelwright especially lamented that modernist poetry was dominated by conservative voices, and that the Romantic fervor of inspiration had given way to Classical imitation...

...When Wheelright wrote that stanza (From "Gestures to the Dead"), Shelley-the radical saint-was discredited in neo-Metaphysical circles and Eliot held sway Today, books are written to tell us how sad Eliot's life was, his place in the poetic canon is attacked, and Shelley's true stature is better recognized We can be grateful to Alan Wald for demonstrating that John Wheelwright's life was not sad, and to Alvin Rosenfeld and New Directions for reviving his fascinating work...

...Mangan originally refused to join the Socialists His dream was to live permanently in Pans as an expatriate writer Then Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party mobilized him, and with Wheelwright he helped to found the Socialist Workers Party Under the pseudonym of Terence Phelan he wrote articles on the political crisis in France for the Trotskyite Socialist Appeal These were so well received that in 1938 he moved there, not to lead a bohemian life after all, but to cover "the end of French democracy" for the Fourth International Significantly, his eyewitness report of the fall of France is more lyrical than any of his verses "Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of June, the petroleum and gasoline reserves in all the suburban refineries were set on fire by the retreating French troops Pans was ringed with monumental and sinister columns of jet, oily smoke These, meeting at the zenith, far above the white cumulus clouds, slowly blotted out the sun, and spread a black pall over the doomed and deserted city The blotting out of 'the city of light' by that cloud was a sort of grim apocalypse ". Mangan also reported for Time-Life and for Partisan Review (as Sean Niall) He covered the cultural scene as well as politics, reviewing Finnegans Wake and befriending Gertrude Stein His relatively meager income did not prevent him from living like a king This pleasant existence came to an abrupt end in the mid-1940s when Whittaker Chambers became the foreign news editor at Time Mangan found himself purged, presumably for political reasons The rest of his life was a downhill slide It seems ironically appropriate that he once moved into a room at the Chelsea Hotel from which Dylan Thomas had just been taken in an alcoholic coma Wald implies that the opposition to Communists helped destroy Mangan and kept him from realizing his potential as a writer Maybe so, yet the intriguing narrative of The Revolutionary Imagination suggests more powerfully that Sherry Mangan was his own worst enemy...