Long Step Ahead Taken by Gregory in New Epic Poem (1935)
Review of Horace Gregory’s Chorus for Survival
The acclaim has all been for Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis, as the finest of the English revolutionary poets.1 Now we put aside the telescope and look through our eyes: here, in America, Horace Gregory stands in the same relation to us as those three do to the English. With this new book, Chorus for Survival, he reaches a more ambitious place in poetry than any American has done since Hart Crane’s The Bridge.2 And, where the earlier poem was diffuse, consciously obscure, and shortsighted in its view of society and history, this long joined poem sustains itself in precise, energetic terms, seeing the country, from Emerson’s limits, with his “curious scientific dreaming eye”:
Fixed on the landscape ash-tree, elm,
And rippling grass like water at low tide:
Trees’ branches spars of Salem’s ships that rode
Jewel-edged at sunset into Asia’s side
Hear Y, the Communist at Union Square,
Lenin’s great hand against the sky, the lips declaiming:
“Down, metaphysics down; up heart, up fire
to burn out doubt and fear . . .”
—to a country whose museum is Park Avenue, whose subways and sweepstakes, Wisconsin fields and asphalt city squares are reality.3
From its promise of wealth and success in boom times (“The neon sign ‘Success’ across our foreheads”) the writer travels, making in his own life the voyage from Wisconsin to New York, across to England, and Ireland, seeing the impossibility of denying country, as T. S. Eliot denies, of denying the past, of making himself anything but a confirming reflection of his country and his time.4 And, finally, we have the return to this country, to the future after the panic of mock peace and bank crashes:
Turn here, my son
(No longer turn to what we were)
Build in the sunlight with strong men
Beyond our barricade:
For even I remember the old war
And death in peace.5
Chorus for Survival opens up a new form for the epic idea. There has been a demand for heroic structure that would be adapted to our life and to revolutionary thought; this book suggests and contains one solution, for its progress, as narrative and as formal scheme, builds up to a resemblance to the old epic that is no longer usable. It answers more than that in its implicit refutation, for example, of Robinson Jeffers’s idea of the dead western world, and the trip westward as a journey to death.6 It answers, also, the promise of earlier poems, losing the immediacy that was noticed in Chelsea Rooming House, enlarging the personal restrictions in No Retreat.7 The poetry will be difficult to classify, with its resources of American and classical history, its wiry, graceful fluency, its political stand so close to the Communist Party, but with a national rather than a sectarian emphasis.
It is crowded with places and people; with pursuits and lyric quiet; musically and ideologically so varied as to sum up in a dynamic, accumulated ending. If we get lost here in the essentially leftist controversy over what is proletarian and what is not, we shall be lost indeed; this poem is written from the point of view of a poet whose writing is his trade, and is in the same class as its author, whose concentration has been on his work, and who has been actively close to the Communist Party in affiliated organizations, clubs, and strike work.
Chorus for Survival is an effort toward permanence that deserves its goal, a work that could be seized upon by the left-wing as one of its real advances in American poetry, in technique, in clarity of thought, in a national adaptation of the principles of revolutionary writers, and in a proud affirmation of the masses of this country:
As the map changes, through the cold sky,
Lean from the cockpit, read
The flower of prairie grass in seed
(Though here is war
my hand points where the body
Leaps its dead, the million poor,
Steel-staved and broken
and no grave shall hold them
Either in stone or sea; nor urn nor sand,
Skyline of city walls, their monument,
And on this field, lockstep in millions joined,
New world in fire opens where they stand).8
(Daily Worker, 1935)
1. At the time, British poets W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis were avowed socialists.
2. Horace Gregory, Chorus for Survival (New York: Covici, Friede, 1935), reviewed here, was structurally like Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930). Both epics consist of multiple poems, voiced by different lyric subjects at various points in American history.
3. First quote and first block quote from Gregory, Chorus, part 14, 85. Told from the perspective of transcendentalist philosopher and poet-activist Ralph Waldo Emerson on his 1833 return to the United States from Europe. Second block quote from Gregory, Chorus, part 4, 35. Anticipating a labor strike, the narrator tries to reconcile a scientist’s cool objectivity with an activist’s “fiery” rhetoric.
4. Parenthetical quote from Gregory, Chorus, part 19, 122. Gregory’s italics. T. S. Eliot became a naturalized British citizen in 1927. His Waste Land (1922) is an intertext for Crane’s “The Tunnel,” from The Bridge.
5. Gregory, Chorus, part 19, 122. Gregory’s italics. In this final section of the epic, the narrator addresses his son and envisions American solidarity in a communist future. Before the quote, Rukeyser mentions the “mock peace” of the False Armistice, the four-days-premature declaration of the Great War’s end on November 7, 1919; and the US stock market crash on October 24, 1929, which started the Great Depression.
6. Robinson Jeffers’s misanthropic and pessimistic narrative long poems influenced Rukeyser. See Muriel Rukeyser, “Modern Trends: American Poetry,” in this volume.
7. Gregory’s first two collections, Chelsea Rooming House (1930) and No Retreat (1933).
8. Gregory, Chorus, part 19, 126. Gregory’s italics.