Poems for Workers (Gomez 1925)/Preface

by multiple authors

Layout 2

Preface

 

This anthology of poems for workers is, I think, the only one of its kind in the English language. Symposiums have been made of poems "about workers" and there have been a number of collections of poetry and prose gathered together under the general all-embracing head of "literature and art of the humanist thinkers of the world"—notably the well-known volume entitled "The Cry for Social Justice," edited by Upton Sinclair, which includes the chance writings on social justice of such anti-proletarian figures as Bismarck, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, John D. Rockefeller, Rudyard Kipling . . . and even Hall Caine. The poems in the present booklet center upon the life, struggles and revolutionary movement of the working class. They are in fact an indivisible part of the working class struggle. Originally written for and directed to the working class, they are here collected for working class readers.

For the most part, the anthology consists of poems which I have seen here and there in labor periodicals and which I have cut out and saved over a period of years. The selection is therefore quite arbitrary. It is, of course, by no means exhaustive. Readers will notice many omissions, some of which—like "The International"—were left out to make room for less familiar poems and others—like Arturo Giovanitti's "The Walker"—because they were too long to be included. It is true that Giovanitti's "When the Cock Crows" is even longer than "The Walker" but I do not think anyone will be sorry for its inclusion.

As already stated, I have thought it best to limit the selection to poems which belong directly to the class struggle. The majority of the authors have been themselves active in the revolutionary proletarian movement in some capacity or other, and many of them are active in the struggle at the present time. The following pages are thus commended to working class readers as a product of their own movement. Workers will see in these poems an earnest of the invincible sweep, the elemental necessity, the suffering and heroism, the sacrifice and courage, the bitterness and devotion, the steady persistence, the already dawning triumph, of the class struggle of the proletarians of all nations for the overthrow of wage-slavery and the establishment of a new society.

 

—M. G.

Acknowledgement is made to the periodicals in which the poems originally appeared: International Socialist Review, The Masses, Liberator, Solidarity, Industrial Worker, Industrial Pioneer, New York Call, Daily Herald (London), Workers Monthly. Also to the Century Company, for permission to reprint Louis Untermeyer's "Caliban in the Coal Mines"; to Henry Holt & Co., for some of Sandburg's poems; to Alfred A. Knopf, for poems by James Oppenheim, and to the Leonard Press, for poems by Ralph Chaplin.