The "Dynamo" School of Poets

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If they have not been wholly ignored, the radical poets of the thirties have usually been dismissed as naive, incompetent, and unworthy of serious consideration. Yet whatever their weaknesses, these writers represent an important phenomenon in American literary history and, in fact, they often were successful in their experiments with political ideology and poetic technique. As Morton Zabel wrote in the June 1934 issue of Poetry,1 one of the more interesting of the recent crop of left-wing magazines was Dynamo: A Journal of Revolutionary Poetry, whose purpose was to forge a new school of poets out of the proletarian movement.2 Calling for innovations that reflected the new social sensibility, the magazine attracted the most exciting of the leftist poets. Among those who appeared in its pages were Sol Funaroff, Kenneth Fearing, and Muriel Rukeyser, each of whom I have singled out for discussion, as well as Horace Gregory, Edwin Rolfe, Haakon Chevalier, Ben Maddow,3 Isidor Schneider, William Pillin, Hector Bella, and Michael Gold. Although Dynamo published no formal manifesto nor made an explicit statement of purpose, it did, in a sense, represent a school. As its name indicated, it manifested an interest in dynamic rather than static poetry, thereby rejecting Imagism, and in the machine as a