Proletarian poetry

Proletarian poetry is a genre of political poetry developed in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s that endeavored to portray class-conscious perspectives of the working-class. Connected through their mutual political message that may be either explicitly Marxist or at least socialist, the poems are often aesthetically disparate. As a literature that emphasized working-class voices, the poetic form of works could range from emulating African-American slave work songs to contemporary modernist poetry. Major poets of the movement include Langston Hughes, Kenneth Fearing, Edwin Rolfe, Horace Gregory, and Mike Gold.

While mainly originating in the proletarian literary movement that arose out of the avantgardist post-revolutionary era of the Soviet Union, proletarian poetry also had many antecedents in the United States before it rose to prominence in the 1920s. Coal miners in Pennsylvania wrote and sang militant labor songs, a form the Industrial Workers of the World embraced throughout the years before World War I. Elements of proletarian literature and poetry could also be seen in the works of William Carlos Williams, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London. During the 1910s, the reporter and poet John Reed, along with other professional writers and leftists in the labor movement, also assisted in strikes and formed plans for workers' theaters.

In 1926, the leftist magazine The New Masses was established and quickly took the forefront in defining and promoting proletarian poetry. Members of their staff went on in 1929 to organize John Reed Clubs in numerous cities around the country. Marxist in their ideology, although not officially affiliated with the Communist Party, these clubs sought to develop the writing skills of white and blue-collar workers to publish proletarian poetry and literature. Other American communist organs publishing proletarian poetry and literature during the 1920s and 30s included Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator, the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker,The Anvil edited by Jack Conroy, Blast, and Partisan Review.

...
Wikipedia