Word: poet
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...hundreds of local labor councils in which A. F. of L. and C.I.O. unionists can work together effectively, but which a complete breach between the two national organizations makes increasingly difficult. Last week former C.I.O. enthusiast Dubinsky stayed away from the C.I.O. meeting, sent instead Julius Hochman, poet, dilettante and hard-boiled manager of the New York Dressmakers' Joint Board...
Some time after the Great Depression, Poet Archibald MacLeish, growing more and more shocked by contemporary U. S. social and economic conditions, decided that his poetry had better get busy and do something about them. To carry out this decision, which seemed to necessitate writing poems about matters of immediate popular concern, Poet MacLeish began to top-work his poetry on to popular art forms. First sizable sprout to grow from this top-working was Panic (1935), a graft of lyric poetry on the drama. This verse-play depicted a scene from the currently-expected crack-up of what Communists...
Next product of Poet MacLeish's top-working was a radio-play-poem, The Fall of the City, broadcast in 1937. A radio-studio innovation, it presented Fascism as a spook-in-armor, stalking in on and taking control of a nation paralyzed by inertia, fear and propaganda. Few listeners-in agreed on the poetic merits of what the rather wild air waves had been saying, but most did agree that if Fascism should come to the U. S. it would come as a man, not a spook, agreed also that in The Fall of the City Radio-Play...
Latest socio-poetic graft that Poet MacLeish has produced is Land of the Free, in which he top-works his poetry on to the art form of the news-picture magazine. In this book, 88 photographs of U. S. landscape and people (taken independently of Poet MacLeish, and mostly for the Resettlement Administration) are "illustrated" by a running verse commentary in which Poet MacLeish says his say about a sweet land whose liberty, for many of its inhabitants, went sour...
...become, is recorded with indelible indifference by the heartbreaking or horrifying photographs in Land of the Free. They show piercingly characteristic, dead-beat scenes from all over the U. S., with a heavy preponderance from below the Mason-Dixon line. Consequently some may feel that Poet MacLeish's selection doesn't fight fair with All-American self-gratulation, that too many of its blows land below the Bible-belt. Most people, however, will agree that these superbly taken, brilliantly presented photographs are the most excoriating testimonial yet published to the gutting that U. S. citizens have given...