Tradition, too, wore a double face: it could represent the ideology binding women and children to patriarchal families, but it could also stand for collective spirit and anti-colonial resistance.176 Anarchist poets in Korea and Japan seem to have readily drawn on national traditions. If Western anarchists often attempted to root movement poetry in historically deeper cultural traditions, using these to gain leverage against a degraded and “decadent” industrial modernity, so too did Korean anarchist poets turn to their oral traditions, using the centuries-old musical and performance-based lyrical (sijo), folk-song (minyo), and ballad (minyosi) forms, which had the additional benefit of linking them to peasant communities who had been on the move well before the arrival of Western anarchist ideologies.177 Meanwhile, traditional poetic forms like kanshi (Japanese poems written in Chinese characters) and tanka were intimately habitual modes of expression for Japanese anarchists, such as Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), Kanno Suga (1881–1911), and Kaneko Fumiko (1903–1926).178 Japanese anarchist-feminist Takamure Itsue wrote in the waka tradition, and her compatriot Ishikawa Sanshirō took inspiration from epics like the Sangokushi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms).179 At times, we even find Chinese anarchists, such as the Esperantist and anti-Confucian Liu Shifu (1884–1915), advocating a certain traditionalism against modernism, paradoxically aligning themselves with their political enemies, the conservative Confucian scholars. “One is left,” remarks Pik-chong Agnes Wong Chan, “with the picture of an individual who, after having smashed the pedestal on which he had been standing, tightly holds on to one of the pieces of debris that have fallen around him, as if not to be totally bewildered by the consequences of his act of destruction.”180
Instead of dividing into rival avant-gardes competing to be the most modern, anarchist poets often differentiated themselves by the various ways in which they borrowed from the past. In some contexts, anarchist movement poetics presented a revival of romanticism—idealist, sentimental, without modernist reserve. Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, who stood for all that was embarrassing about romanticism in the eyes of T.S. Eliot, was for German anarchist Ret Marut (a.k.a. B. Traven, ca. 1882–1969) “the greatest lyric poet of world literature.”181 Such a judgment is echoed by Scottish comrade Thomas Hastie Bell (1867–1942), who wrote, in praise of the American philosophical anarchist Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944), “I put you among our Anarchist poets, such as Burns, Shelley, Whitman, Wilde, Carpenter”182—virtually an anarchist canon, judging how often they were subjects of anarchist lectures and essays, their poems reprinted in anarchist journals such as Mother Earth and L’Endehors.183 “Walt Whitman, the Liberator of Sex,” as Emma Goldman called him in the title of one of her lectures, became a touchstone of movement poetry more for his declamatory, prophetic style than for his free-verse experimentalism. “Every Bavarian child,” declared Landauer, German translator of his Leaves of Grass, ought to “know Walt Whitman by heart”; in the pages of The Libertarian, Leonard D. Abbott wrote that “the Anarchist in Whitman is revealed on almost every page he wrote.”184 Similarly, Victor Hugo was embraced by Francophone anarchists such as Louise Michel (1830–1905), while Jewish anarchist poet Joseph Bovshover (1873–1915) committed to memory the verse of Heinrich Heine, a poet equally lionized by German-speaking anarchists.185
In the Anglo-American context, this quite frequently meant that, even in the period of high modernist revolt against the “genteel tradition,” anarchists such as Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) were continuing to produce poetry on something like a Victorian model, pairing didactic, sentimental content with an ornamental, “oratorical” or prophetic style.186 “Sometimes the idiom is definitely that of Whitman, sometimes that of the Bible,” wrote Louis Untermeyer, describing Wood’s poetry—an observation that could be borne out by a reading of passages such as this one, excerpted for the 1929 Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry by anarchist editor Marcus Graham (a.k.a. Shmuel Marcus, 1893–1985) from Wood’s The Poet in the Desert:187
Oh, Revolution, dread angel of the Awful Presence,
Warder of the gate of tears,
Open and set the captive free.
Dark, silent, loving, cruel and merciful one,
Hold yourself not aloof.
….................................................................
Pitch head-long from the cloudy battlements
And, with heavenly-fire, utterly destroy
This distorted and mis-shapen world.188
Here, it is Biblical language (e.g., the use of archaic senses of the words “dread” and “Awful,” the images of an “angel,” “heavenly-fire,” etc.) that accomplishes the task Theodor Adorno assigned to modernism—the evocation of “perspectives” to “displace and estrange the world, reveal[ing] it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”189 From such “messianic” perspectives, it is not the anarchist who is aberrant, eccentric, deviant; it is the botched, the corrupt and broken world.
The search for premodern poetic models brought anarchists such as Gustav Landauer in Germany and Edouard Rothen in France to look to the Middle Ages as a high point in the integration of the arts with society.190 In other national contexts, such as that of Brazil, where the sonnet flourished in the pages of anarchist journals such as O Sindicalista and A Plebe, anarchist poets such as José Oiticica took the ancient Greek poets as their model, embracing a classical ideal in defiance of “decadent” modernity.191 Similarly taking the side of the classical against the romantic school, the Proudhonian worker-educators of L’Atelier: organe spécial de la classe laborieuse, who in 1843 declared that romanticism had “done nothing” for the people—a judgment that made sense, perhaps, in a country where a late-arriving romanticism had quickly aligned itself with counterrevolutionary forces, and where the left-wing “social romanticism” of the mature Victor Hugo had yet to emerge.192 In still other instances, anarchist poetics entailed a turn away from both the “ancient” and “modern” poles of the Western tradition in favor of “primitive,” folkloric forms: for instance, Louise Michel drew on the pagan tradition of the Gauls of her native Haute-Marne and her fascination with the Kanak songs and stories she heard in the penal colony of New Caledonia, while the Spanish anarchist poets drew on folkloric traditions of the verso de romance, a kind of popular ballad, which linked contemporary realities with the mythic past. Even such a champion of avant-garde modernism as Herbert Read (1893–1968) insisted that Surrealism itself had a precursor in “ballads and anonymous literature.”193
In nearly all of its varieties, whether romantic, classical, or primitivist, anarchist poetics favored what the German-Jewish anarchist poet Erich Mühsam (1878–1934) called the “tendency-poem” (Tendenzlyrik) or “poem of struggle” (K ampflyrik), what others would call “committed” poetry—that is, poetry with a clear rhetorical function.194 Moreover, much anarchist poetry was written not by traditionally educated poets of the middle and upper classes but by working-class men and women, often autodidacts, who self-categorized their work as “proletarian poetry,” “workers’ poetry,” “social poetry,” or “popular poetry.”195 This, in turn, implied that whatever elements of exalted style might be borrowed from past schools of poetics, the diction of anarchist poetry had to remain accessible and plebeian.
Whereas modernist poetics declared, in the words of Mallarmé, that a poem should express itself “in words that are allusive, never direct, reducing themselves to the same silence”—or, as Archibald MacLeish put it, that it ought to be “mute”—the urgencies of speech,