“I think of Chaplin”: Poetry and the Tramp in Cold War America

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores how Charlie Chaplin’s tribulations under McCarthyism, which culminated in his exile from the US in 1952, occasioned a minor chorus of poetry on the American Left. Through case studies of Bob Kaufman, Edwin Rolfe, and Louis Zukofsky, this essay explores how radical poets from across different literary groupings were drawn to Chaplin in the Cold War’s early years out of personal and political solidarity, while also finding in him a figure through whom they could collectively register and resist the Left’s broader postwar decline. The article also sheds light on the much longer history of Chaplin’s connections with poetry and poets. It traces his relationship with socialist writers back to the 1910s and suggests how postwar poetry’s imaginative investment in Chaplin as a political figure has a deeper layer of significance, given that the filmmaker had for decades been influenced by his friendships with poets on the Left. The essay proposes that poetry’s unique potentiality as a form through which to oppose Chaplin’s struggles under McCarthyism is a consequence of poets having fostered his political consciousness in the first place.Reading [texts] . . . about Chaplin’s postwar political isolation comparatively and cumulatively, what emerges is a poetry whose shared references bespeak a form of fraught solidarity and whose full force resides in their being understood as a kind of communal response.