This essay reads Kenneth Fearing's Depression-era poetry as an innovative body of Marxist verse, one that attempts to craft an aesthetic reaction of shock and disorientation in the reader. In order to explicate the use-value of aesthetic shock to a Marxist politics concerned with anti-capitalist praxis, it draws on Susan Buck-Morss's interpretation of Walter Benjamin, an interpretation that focuses on the latter's theorization of aesthetic sensation in the modern period. Because the modern condition is one of anaesthetized sensory existence (an existence managed by and conducive to hegemonic capitalism), the use of poetry to spark sensation in the reader can be a revolutionary project. Fearing accomplishes this project by confronting the primary agent of shock in the modern period, electricity, and exploring it in its full dialectical complexity. Fearing is a Marxist poet, but of a different sort than most Depression-era proletarian poets. His poems do not provide ideological guidance in the manner of propaganda, nor do they stop at ideology critique. Instead, they act upon the senses of the reader in order to awaken him or her from the dreamworld of modern capitalism to the real need for transformative struggle.

Keywords: U.S. Proletarian Poetry / Fearing, Kenneth / Benjamin, Walter / electricity / The Great Depression

INTRODUCTION

Although Kenneth Fearing has been marginalized in American literary history, he was nonetheless a major figure during the Depression years, a poet respected alike by the radical Left and the mainstream. Identified with the proletarian literary movement, Fearing frequently published poems and reviews in the New Masses, the cultural organ closely tied to the American Communist Party. (1) His poems were also prominently featured in Proletarian Literature in the United States, the 1935 anthology compiled by Communist literary critics. In the words of Alan Wald, Fearing was "the premier poet of the Communist cultural movement" whose "verse seemed a beacon for the cultural Left" (Exiles 9). Granville Hicks, the Party's scholarly advocate of proletarian literature and a respected intellectual in his own right during the 1930s, praised Fearing's concern with "shaping forms of expression for the uttermost intricacies of thought and feeling." For Hicks, Fearing was the exemplar of a superior kind of political poet, one who innovatively transcended mere propaganda: Hicks distinguished Fearing from proletarian "doggerelists," or poets who simply rendered "the easy phrases of revolutionary oratory" in verse form (Great Tradition 324). (2) William Phillips and Philip Rahv, before their break with the Party in 1937, explicitly identified Fearing as the poet of choice for educated Communist intellectuals ("Recent Problems" 372). Fearing's reputation extended beyond the Left as well: he won a Guggenheim following the publication of his 1935 volume Poems, and would later garner recognition from Poetry magazine and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Ryley xx). In Depression-era America, Fearing was recognized as a leading poet on the Left and as a talented practitioner of literary modernism. His citational, often fragmentary and polyvocal poetry--a poetry by turns Eliotic and Whitmanesque, and which anticipates the style of the...