that anarchism sought to break, whereby revolutionaries come to mimic and identify with the authorities they overthrow, becoming the new bearers of authority—“the re-writing of the father,” as Bloom puts it.163
Accounts of the avant-gardes that seek to write them into the history of anarchism face another embarrassment: their engagement with anarchism rarely amounted to participation in or “commitment” to the anarchist movement.164 Mallarmé maintained a gingerly distance from anarchist action, and Ball flatly declared, “I am not an anarchist.”165 Moreover, the anarchist movement, which refused to nullify social commitments in the name of the autonomous individual, was not, on the whole, welcoming toward these experimenters, whose work they often saw as willfully obscure at best, more suited to the narcissistic enjoyment of a self-appointed élite than to the needs of working-class people in struggle (fig. 1).166 As Georges Poinsot and Mafféo-Charles Normandy bluntly conclude, in their review of the “social poets,” with regard to the Symbolists: “They are not social.”167 If the avant-garde poetics of the early-twentieth century were less quietistic and more confrontational than their Symbolist forebears, they were no more inclined to position themselves as speakers in a public arena of discourse: faced with a “crowd,” as André Breton famously put it in 1929, “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly”—the only alternative being to accept a “well-defined place in the crowd,… belly at barrel-level.”168 As a means of dismissing “the crowd” from the poet’s room (since, in truth, few Surrealists ever took up arms), the signature Surrealist technique of trance-writing, écriture automatique, was both less violent and more effective, letting the writer disavow public responsibility for the published word.
However serious these literary bohemian allies were in their political commitments, a search of the international anarchist press during the period of the greatest avant-garde ferment—the flourishing of Dada, Imagism, Futurism, Surrealism—reveals few traces of their work. These periodicals are not bereft of poems; on the contrary, as Pessin notes, it was quite common for them to print poetry alongside reportage, opinion pieces, correspondence, and statistics (fig. 2).169 Nonetheless, the anarchist movement did not depend on the productions of the avant-gardes for its poetry. Rather, the movement developed its own poetics—a poetics that, in many respects, appeared intent on affirming and even reinforcing the very kinds of symbolic relations that the avant-gardes had set themselves against. At the same time, these poets, at least at the movement’s peak, seem to have been largely unconcerned with the problem of influence in Bloom’s sense.
It is this other poetic tradition, the poetry of the anarchist movement, in its broadest historical dimensions, that this chapter is intended to investigate. I would like to ask: What is the relationship of this anarchist movement poetics 1.) to the speech of the past (i.e., to poetic legacies or traditions), 2.) to the adult speaking subject that emerges from this past speech, and 3.) to the public sphere that the speaking subject is supposed to found?
Within anarchist counter-communities, as Clara Rey has observed, poems are usually identified as “anarchist” not by virtue of revolutionary experimentation with form, but by their revolutionary content.170 Anarchist movement poetics, which has been termed “traditional” or “classical in form,” “filled with stereotypes,” “rather banal,” “unoriginal,” “staid,” is quite at odds with Pound’s “make it new.”171 Even in 1896, while anarchists were rubbing elbows with Symbolists and Decadents in Paris, an anarchist poet like André Veidaux (a.k.a. Adrien Devaux, 1868–1927) could face criticism from peers for too much stylistic “novelty” and “originality.”172
In East Asia, as Kim Gyoung-Bog notes, “modernity seemed to wear a double face”: colonial, mechanical, and oppressive in many respects, but potentially also rational, emancipatory, and utopian.173 Asian anarchists often felt the attractions of literary modernity outweighed its tainted association with the humiliation of colonialism; in particular, for a China repeatedly humiliated and colonized not only by the West but by neighboring Japan, the stigma of backwardness was of pressing concern. Native literary traditions were sometimes too closely identified with the patriarchal, Confucian culture that anarchists, as modernizers and advocates of “New Woman” discourse, were trying to overthrow. Tradition was felt, particularly by students such as Li Shizeng (1881–1973) in the “Paris group,” as a constraint, something to be shed, e.g., by importation (the translation of Western political and literary texts into Chinese), simplification (the adoption of baihua over old-fashioned “literary” writing), universalization (the replacement of Chinese by Esperanto), or rationalization (shifting from centuries-old forms of poetry to nineteenth-century Western-style narrative prose). “All the classical texts,” cried Wu Zhihui (1865–1953), “should be thrown down the toilet.”174 Whereas traditional Japanese poetics had often emphasized simplicity and immediacy, Chinese poetry was associated with a “classical” (yulu) literary diction so far removed from everyday speech as to be almost unintelligible to ordinary workers—a “hierarchy of genres” reinforcing the class hierarchy that the anarchist educators aimed to overcome.175 Thus, in Japan, anarchist poets formed avant-gardes modeled after Western Dada and Futurism, such as the “Mavo” group and the short-lived journal Aka to Kuro (Black and Red, 1923), while Chinese anarchists like Ba Jin (a.k.a. Li Feigan, 1904–2005) tended to retreat from poetry altogether, striving instead to produce a modern prose, modeled after the Western social novel of Zola and Tolstoy, that would be maximally accessible.
Tradition, too, wore a double face: it could represent the ideology binding women and children to patriarchal families, but it could also stand for collective spirit and anti-colonial resistance.176 Anarchist poets in Korea and Japan seem to have readily drawn on national traditions. If Western anarchists often attempted to root movement poetry in historically deeper cultural traditions, using these to gain leverage against a degraded and “decadent” industrial modernity, so too did Korean anarchist poets turn to their oral traditions, using the centuries-old musical and performance-based lyrical (sijo), folk-song (minyo), and ballad (minyosi) forms, which had the additional benefit of linking them to peasant communities who had been on the move well before the arrival of Western anarchist ideologies.177 Meanwhile, traditional poetic forms like kanshi (Japanese poems written in Chinese characters) and tanka were intimately habitual modes of expression for Japanese anarchists, such as Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), Kanno Suga (1881–1911), and Kaneko Fumiko (1903–1926).178 Japanese anarchist-feminist Takamure Itsue wrote in the waka tradition, and her compatriot Ishikawa Sanshirō took inspiration from epics like the Sangokushi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms).179 At times, we even find Chinese anarchists, such as the Esperantist and anti-Confucian Liu Shifu (1884–1915), advocating a certain traditionalism against modernism, paradoxically aligning themselves with their political enemies, the conservative Confucian scholars. “One is left,” remarks Pik-chong Agnes Wong Chan, “with the picture of an individual who, after having smashed the pedestal on which he had been standing, tightly holds on to one of the pieces of debris that have fallen around him, as if not to be totally bewildered by the consequences of his act of destruction.”180
Instead of dividing into rival avant-gardes competing to be the most modern, anarchist poets often differentiated themselves by the various ways in which they borrowed from the past. In some contexts, anarchist movement poetics presented a revival of romanticism—idealist, sentimental, without modernist reserve. Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, who stood for all that was embarrassing about romanticism in the eyes of T.S. Eliot, was for German anarchist Ret Marut (a.k.a. B. Traven, ca. 1882–1969) “the greatest lyric poet of world literature.”181 Such a judgment is echoed by Scottish comrade Thomas Hastie Bell (1867–1942), who wrote, in praise of the American philosophical anarchist Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944), “I put you among our Anarchist poets, such as Burns, Shelley, Whitman, Wilde, Carpenter”182—virtually an anarchist canon, judging how often they were subjects of anarchist lectures and essays, their poems reprinted in anarchist journals such as Mother Earth and L’Endehors.183 “Walt Whitman, the Liberator of Sex,” as Emma Goldman called him in the title of one of her lectures, became a touchstone of movement poetry more for his declamatory, prophetic style than for his free-verse experimentalism. “Every Bavarian child,” declared Landauer, German translator
