There are probably a lot of technical errors in Giovannitti’s poems.[1] I didn’t notice. And perhaps that is one of the tests of great poetry,—not the faults that you can’t find because they’re not there, but the faults that will not be discovered. Something else absorbs you.
The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a new sort of song. And doubtless because of this song it will be many years before we see his greatness. For the song that he sings is not a pleasant song. It is the song of the people as he learned it in the Lawrence strike and hummed it over in the jails of Salem. He and his song are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We do not comprehend the labor problem of the unskilled, just as we do not comprehend the I. W. W. that has come out of it. A poet has arisen to explain.
Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough. Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of work—you can’t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people behind the work—active or idle, skilled or not—“Plebs, Populace, People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.” He cries the awakening of that great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common attribute—the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation:
Think! If your brain will but extend
As far as what your hands have done,
If but your reason will descend
As deep as where your feet have gone,
The walls of ignorance shall fall
That stood between you and your world.…
Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn,