as Louise Michel (1830–1905), while Jewish anarchist poet Joseph Bovshover (1873–1915) committed to memory the verse of Heinrich Heine, a poet equally lionized by German-speaking anarchists.185
In the Anglo-American context, this quite frequently meant that, even in the period of high modernist revolt against the “genteel tradition,” anarchists such as Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) were continuing to produce poetry on something like a Victorian model, pairing didactic, sentimental content with an ornamental, “oratorical” or prophetic style.186 “Sometimes the idiom is definitely that of Whitman, sometimes that of the Bible,” wrote Louis Untermeyer, describing Wood’s poetry—an observation that could be borne out by a reading of passages such as this one, excerpted for the 1929 Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry by anarchist editor Marcus Graham (a.k.a. Shmuel Marcus, 1893–1985) from Wood’s The Poet in the Desert:187
Oh, Revolution, dread angel of the Awful Presence,
Warder of the gate of tears,
Open and set the captive free.
Dark, silent, loving, cruel and merciful one,
Hold yourself not aloof.
….................................................................
Pitch head-long from the cloudy battlements
And, with heavenly-fire, utterly destroy
This distorted and mis-shapen world.188
Here, it is Biblical language (e.g., the use of archaic senses of the words “dread” and “Awful,” the images of an “angel,” “heavenly-fire,” etc.) that accomplishes the task Theodor Adorno assigned to modernism—the evocation of “perspectives” to “displace and estrange the world, reveal[ing] it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”189 From such “messianic” perspectives, it is not the anarchist who is aberrant, eccentric, deviant; it is the botched, the corrupt and broken world.
The search for premodern poetic models brought anarchists such as Gustav Landauer in Germany and Edouard Rothen in France to look to the Middle Ages as a high point in the integration of the arts with society.190 In other national contexts, such as that of Brazil, where the sonnet flourished in the pages of anarchist journals such as O Sindicalista and A Plebe, anarchist poets such as José Oiticica took the ancient Greek poets as their model, embracing a classical ideal in defiance of “decadent” modernity.191 Similarly taking the side of the classical against the romantic school, the Proudhonian worker-educators of L’Atelier: organe spécial de la classe laborieuse, who in 1843 declared that romanticism had “done nothing” for the people—a judgment that made sense, perhaps, in a country where a late-arriving romanticism had quickly aligned itself with counterrevolutionary forces, and where the left-wing “social romanticism” of the mature Victor Hugo had yet to emerge.192 In still other instances, anarchist poetics entailed a turn away from both the “ancient” and “modern” poles of the Western tradition in favor of “primitive,” folkloric forms: for instance, Louise Michel drew on the pagan tradition of the Gauls of her native Haute-Marne and her fascination with the Kanak songs and stories she heard in the penal colony of New Caledonia, while the Spanish anarchist poets drew on folkloric traditions of the verso de romance, a kind of popular ballad, which linked contemporary realities with the mythic past. Even such a champion of avant-garde modernism as Herbert Read (1893–1968) insisted that Surrealism itself had a precursor in “ballads and anonymous literature.”193
In nearly all of its varieties, whether romantic, classical, or primitivist, anarchist poetics favored what the German-Jewish anarchist poet Erich Mühsam (1878–1934) called the “tendency-poem” (Tendenzlyrik) or “poem of struggle” (K ampflyrik), what others would call “committed” poetry—that is, poetry with a clear rhetorical function.194 Moreover, much anarchist poetry was written not by traditionally educated poets of the middle and upper classes but by working-class men and women, often autodidacts, who self-categorized their work as “proletarian poetry,” “workers’ poetry,” “social poetry,” or “popular poetry.”195 This, in turn, implied that whatever elements of exalted style might be borrowed from past schools of poetics, the diction of anarchist poetry had to remain accessible and plebeian.
Whereas modernist poetics declared, in the words of Mallarmé, that a poem should express itself “in words that are allusive, never direct, reducing themselves to the same silence”—or, as Archibald MacLeish put it, that it ought to be “mute”—the urgencies of speech, of establishing communication and community against an enforced silence, made directness and accessibility central poetic values for anarchists.196 Accordingly, anarchist poets would forgo modernist obscurity in favor of “transparency” and “simple symbolism,”197 emphasizing “narration, affirmation, and basic truths.”198 In short, anarchist poetry was “thetic” with a vengeance—a poetics of the intact, adult speaking subject, staking a place in the public square.
Who, then, is speaking to whom in anarchist poems? It was a Romantic poet who insisted that the poet is “a man [sic] speaking to men [sic]”—a speech situation not unlike the ones we encounter every day.199 However, if ordinary speech almost always entails a specific somebody addressing a specific somebody else, what Jonathan Culler has called “the extravagance of lyric” consists in the lyric poet pretending to address almost anyone and anything but the actual reader—speaking as if to Death, the wind, an urn, or a flower—while the actual reader pretends to have “overheard” the poet’s voice.200 All of this is supposed to distance the lyric from the language of politics, i.e., from rhetoric: in Yeats’s famous formulation, if “we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,” then poems spring from “the quarrel with ourselves.”201 We hear an echo of the old lyrical address in Charles Erskine Scott Wood’s poem hailing a personified “Revolution,” asking it, in quasi-religious tones, to “destroy / This distorted and mis-shapen world,” and so on. Is this a pretense on the order of imagining that Blake is actually addressing a tiger? Or might Wood be asking the actual reader to identify himself or herself with the fictive audience, to—in some impossible way—incarnate the idea and become “Revolution”?
The case of Lola Ridge (1873–1941), “our gifted rebel poet,” as Emma Goldman called her, and founder of the anarchist Modern School magazine, might at first appear simpler.202 It is easy to read Ridge’s “Reveille,” appearing in Graham’s Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, as relatively straightforward propaganda—“a call to the workers of the world to rise up in the name of justice against their oppressors,” as Daniel Tobin characteristically puts it:203
Come forth, you workers!
Let the fires go cold—
Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs—
Let the iron run wild
Like a red bramble on the floors204
Ridge’s poem asks us to become something that we are not yet; it speaks to something that is not congealed in the self, to formative forces.205 Likewise, in “The Song of Iron,” Ridge addresses a never entirely tamed force, asking it to make her into something she is not, almost as John Donne once asked God to “break, blow, burn, and make me new”: “Oh fashioned in fire … Behold me, a cupola / Poured to Thy use!”206 In Ridge’s anarchist lyric, then, what appears to be speech addressed to an impossible other is perhaps to be understood instead as evoking the impossible other that is within oneself. Conversely, we might question whether the “simplicity and immediacy” of an address to “you workers” is quite so simple. Consider, for instance, that the version Tobin quotes, with its breathless dashes reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s, is not actually the original form in which “Reveille” was published. In fact, its first appearance, in 1919, was in The Dial—a journal that would
