Giovannitti himself is a remarkable man of remarkable antecedents. He emigrated from his native Italy at the age of seventeen, and was precipitated into our whirl of economic struggle. He worked in Pennsylvania in the coal mines and, later, assumed the position which he still holds: that of editor of the Italian revolutionary weekly, Il Proletario. In the now famous Lawrence strike he was one of those who were most valuable in stimulating the sense of solidarity among the workers and in maintaining their enthusiasm. Together with Joseph J. Ettor and Caruso, he spent several months in jail, awaiting his trial on a faked-up murder charge. They were acquitted, not so much because of the legal justice of their cause but because of the fact that their condemnation would have resulted in the paralysis of the textile industry. With their threat of general strike the workers forced the courts of their masters to deliver up to them their captive spokesmen. The excitement and publicity resultant from the Lawrence Strike brought into prominence the ideas of Giovannitti and others who were espousers of the Syndicalist idea, which in this country is expressed through the organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World.
It is necessary to have some idea of these matters in order to appreciate the leit motif of this book. All through it flares that spirit of impatient revolt, that spurning of most of the scaffolding of our decrepit civilization which is usually held up for admiration to the budding youth of this country. Courts of law, churches, and parliaments all fall under the blinding fire of the bitter contempt of this workman in revolt.
Despite occasional faults in form or stress—and we must remember that Giovannitti is writing in an alien tongue—the poems are vibrant with life and some of them express with truest art things which are not always considered by our academic friends to be at all within the province of poetry.
Sometimes the formal verse forms are used and, at other times, the poet has recourse to the free rhythmic mode of Whitman. Personally, I think that the best work is in the free verse. The Walker, a jail experience of Giovannitti’s, is a wonderful piece of work and should be bracketed with The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The finest thing in the book is The Cage, a poem which appeared originally in The Atlantic Monthly, and which is one of the few things which have preserved that journal from irredeemable mediocrity.
The Cage expresses the thoughts and emotions of the writer when he stood with his two comrades in the dock of Salem courthouse. The contrast is drawn between the outworn formalities and rites of the law and the lusty life of labor,—between the dead lives of the dismal practitioners of a stilted and tyrannical formula and the life of vigorous conflict of the awakening working-class.
This is the inside of the court-room:
In the middle of the great greenish room stood the green iron cage.
All was old, and cold and mournful, ancient with the double antiquity of heart and brain in the great greenish room,
Old and hoary was the man who sat upon the faldstool, upon the fireless and godless altar,
Old were the tomes that mouldered behind him on the dusty shelves.