On John Beecher’s Poetry Essay, Research Paper

Maxwell Geismar

It is ironical but in a sense logical that an

authentic "proletarian" poet today–one who writes directly from the experience

of the people, from the depths of poor people’s lives, and mainly poor black people; a

poet who speaks their language, and whose poetry in turn can be understood by these

people–should be the descendant of a famous old New England family of dissenters,

iconoclasts, atheists and freethinkers (among the clergymen members), ardent

abolitionists, native non-conformists.

It is ironical, logical, and yet perhaps unexpected and doubly refreshing that John

Beecher should fill all these requirements as a rebellious talent bringing to modern times

the spirit of his famous ancestors. I might also add he is a very fine poet who speaks

directly to my soul (and to yours, I am sure) after a long period when poetry was no

longer trying to speak to anybody except the poetic elite–or shall we say clique? In

Robert McAlmon’s fine book on the 1920s, Being Geniuses Together, just lately

revived along with Kay Boyle’s Memoirs, he speaks of T.S. Eliot not altogether reverently.

"I decided to get in touch with T. S. Eliot," he wrote, "although his

cautious articles on criticism did not impress me, nor did his erudition, scholarship, or

his lack of a sense of either life or literature. His moldy poetry struck me as the

perfect expression of a clerkly and liverish man’s apprehension of life, and to me he was

Prufrock."

It is Eliot’s spirit, however, which has dominated modern poetry down to the elegaic,

self-centered, and to me rather weary "confessions" of Robert Lowell. John

Beecher’s poetry, so much to the contrary, so proud, angry, rebellious; so full of moral

dignity and so rocklike–and, believe me, written out of an equal but radical erudition

and scholarship –has been one of the very few dissenting voices during this period. Most

of the books from which this volume of collected poems has been made were either printed

privately or by small radical presses and magazines. It was only indeed in the early ’60s,

when the oppressive and intimidating atmosphere of the Cold War period had lifted, more

than momentarily, as we hope, and the lethargic spell over the national consciousness had

been broken by the civil-rights campaign in the South, white and black alike, that

Beecher’s poetry suddenly came into prominence.

I frankly don’t know, nor too much care, how John Beecher gets his marvelous effects in

those poetic lines which are carved out from the common speech of the people, or from the

beautiful black southern dialects. There are, on the other hand, very subtle, complex,

almost metaphysical poems in this collection where Beecher shows what he can do when he

wants to work with a more "literary," or perhaps just a more Latinic and

polysyllabic mode of language. To achieve the limpid, lucid simplicity of most of these

poems, in a poetic style that, even with some Whitmanesque references, is completely fresh

and original, an artist must obviously know how to handle the most difficult modes of

prosody–must have spent his lifetime, as I suspect John Beecher has, in perfecting the

exact kind of "simplicity" he wants to achieve. What he does is to give to the

various dialects of our country, south, midwest, west and north, a kind of added height

and dignity, while preserving all of the folk knowledge, humor and earthiness. What he

does is to embed these folk tongues into the matrix of our literature.

We get in these poems also a kind of informal yet permanent chronicle of the

"American century," from the depression years in the steel towns and southern

farms to the epoch of Black Power and Vietnam. And what makes this national chronicle so

rare is simply that it is viewed constantly, as in the opening verse of Thoreau,

"Homage to a Subversive," from the underside of things, the radical and

ironically "subversive" side, the side that has been so consistently blocked out

and covered over during these years. We have had a plethora of Cold War accounts which

have distorted the whole meaning of our national history from the Civil War to our

"containment" of Russia and our even more fatal "containment" of

China; from John Brown, who was suddenly declared "insane" in the modern period,

to the "mad and aggressive" Chairman Mao who has not yet invaded a single

foreign country. It is not history we lack in our period, but the courage of men like John

Beecher to see history whole, and to record it so beautifully in these verse chronicles

and narratives.

In any event, another point of these poems is that they are narrative in essence

and contain dramatic movement. Most of the longer ones are based on historical episodes as

recreated in Beecher’s vision of them; the shorter ones contain the essence of a man or

woman’s being, often in ten lines, the essence of a human life, or a place, or an event.

What a relief–after decades of cryptic, convoluted modern verse about remote and obscure

states of human subjectivity, and "alienation." One might say again that nothing

human is alien to John Beecher, and what he sees is not at all a mysterious contemporary

disease (such as the death of God), but a corrupt social system that all too often not

merely alienates its second-class citizens, as based on wealth and skin color, but

destroys them, and not merely theoretically but actually through the process of

armed violence.

Thus the poetry in this volume starts with the industrial conflict of the 1930s in the

southern steel towns: what violence, but what hope in that perhaps last peak of our

society! (This whole vision of the South which Beecher conveys is an antidote to both

Faulkner’s later romanticism — and race reversion — and to Richard Wright’s magnificent

black nightmares.) There is the poem called "The Odyssey of Thomas Benjamin Harrison

Higgenbottom," which conveys in brief, but how eloquently, the whole story of the

small farmer’s obliteration on the national scene.

There is (to mention only a very few highlights of a book which is altogether comprised

of good poetry) the epical verse, "In Egypt Land." This is the story of the

first farmers’ union, organized by the blacks who had nothing more to lose, joined by the

whites, and its bloody extermination by the "laws,"–told here with so much

compassion and human feeling, dramatic power and lyrical grief, as to make you feel you

have participated in the tragedy which is so classical and yet so homespun.

"Here I Stand," written in the 1940s is another poem of both classical and epic

stature that, though an intensely personal chronicle, is one of the best accounts of the

darkening Cold War atmosphere, so oppressive and so fatal to all creative thought and

work–an officially created cultural climate that still haunts us, that distorts all our

historical perspective even through the ’60s, and has run the United States off the

time-track of contemporary society. That is the reason we are always so wrong, and so

dangerous in our foreign policy, working always from one disaster to another; and I see no

remedy for this until our surviving Cold War figures, politicians, educators, journalists,

artists, die off or are put away in the national interest.

There is indeed a whole chorus of poems here which describe and record the effects of

"the air that kills." Perhaps I value this poetry so much just because I came to

the same conclusions before I had read John Beecher’s verse; namely, that the whole

literary establishment in the 1940s and ’50s was a complete fraud, working, whether

consciously or not, whether paid-off or voluntarily, to further the interests of the

"Free World" and a now-discredited American foreign policy.

Now I have only just begun to describe this book of John Beecher’s poems; I would only

add that Beecher’s sense of the contemporary scene is so unique just because he

understands the whole revolutionary core of the American past. In appearance and posture,

as well as in his poetry, John Beecher reminds me of nothing so much as the Last of the

Abolitionists. This collection of his poetry is so good that I feel honored and privileged

to pay homage to it.

Harrison, New York

June 1968

"Introduction" to Hear the Wind Blow: Poems of Protest and Prophecy.

By John Beecher. Copyright ? 1968 by International Publishers.

Marjorie Perloff

John Beecher’s first poems, like those of Van Doren, appeared in the year 1924, but

Beecher’s tradition is that of Sandburg, Lindsay, and the Edgar Lee Masters of Spoon

River Anthology. Beecher’s verse is, however, not poetry at all. Whatever our

definition of poetry—as language inherently different from ordinary speech, as

fictive discourse, as the phenomenological embodiment of the writer’s unique

consciousness, or as the displacement of myth–Beecher cannot properly be called a

"poet." Here, for example, is a passage from "News Item," which

complains of the brutal and unwarranted beating the Alabama police gave to a union leader

for Goodyear Rubber named John House:

The Government of the United States

should know about John House

but maybe they won’t notice the little item

on the back pages of the Birmingham paper

because the front pages are all filled up with Hitler

and how he is threatening democracy

so I am asking

the Government of the United States

to pay a little attention to this. [Poems 1941-1944]

If these sentences were not broken up into line units, no one could distinguish this

passage from a Letter To the Editor. There is no structuring of any sort here, whether

imagistic, prosodic, syntactic, or verbal, no process of selection from the welter of

words which constitutes ordinary speech. Or again, if poetry is defined as fictive

discourse, this passage looks much more like actual discourse: Beecher is clearly trying

to tell the United States Government something about injustice. Fictionality is not

involved.

Beecher’s characters are generally sentimental cardboard figures, and his solutions to

America’s problems are touchingly simplistic. Even as rhetoric, these poem’s

fail. In 1940, he writes that the way to stop Hitler is to build up "American

unity" by helping the "ill-housed/ ill-clothed/ill-fed," by making sure

everyone has "a fair wage" and "a decent place to live in," by

remembering that "all men are created equal" and that Whites must stop

mistreating Blacks. One cannot quarrel with such lofty sentiments, but one never feels

that Beecher has grounded these sentiments in real situations or that he understands the

complexities of history, politics, or social change. Accordingly, this is verse which has

not stood the test of time.

Beecher’s best poem is, I think, Here I Stand, written in 1941. This long

narrative records the poet’s odyssey from Alabama to Washington and then on to New York in

search of life and work. Perhaps because it is more personal than most of Beecher’s poems,

Here I Stand is an authentic and moving record of one man’s struggle to get on. In

conveying the contradictions that characterize our capital—and indeed our way of

life–the poem looks ahead to Ginsberg’s Howl or to the city poem’s of Philip

Whalen and Lew Welch. But the poem ends on a histrionic note ("Here I Stand/John

Beecher on the block…. Do I hear any bids?"), and some of his descriptive detail is

merely flat. William Carlos Williams could juxtapose the most banal objects, creating

surfaces of great subtlety and tension, and Stevens’ "Man on the Dump" learns

how to see the moon come up in an empty sky and can accordingly "reject the

trash." Beecher can do neither.

From "Tradition and the Individual Talent—A Review Essay." In Southern

Humanities Review (1976).

Robert Medredith

Beecher lays bare the class a caste system of the South with delicate inside knowledge,

as in the images of "Fire By Night":

When the burnt black bodies of the homeless

Were found in the embers of the Negro church

Into which they had crept to sleep on the floor

The wails of the people traveled down the cold wind

And reached the ears of the rich on the mountain

Like the distant whistle of a fast train coming

These are wonderful lines, echoing Jeffeerson’s phrase about slavery in the title,

working with the doubleness of "burnt black bodies," suggesting by the diction

of "homeless" and "crept" and even "embers" the suffering of

the southern black poor, making contrasts by means of "wails" and "the cold

wind," and in the last two lines moving with a sure control of the rhythm of the line

to a "fast train coming." Not only does Beecher write as a prophetic and

outraged advocate of Black humanity but as an apocalyptic critic of the everyday

inhumanity of southern Whites, as did some of his ancestors. He specifically identifies

himself with the Blacks as workers in the mills and mines of the South, and if the

earliest poem in his Collected Poems is a clue ("Big Boy," 1924), he was

writing proletarian poetry before proletarian poetry was born in the United States. This

section of a nine part sequence called "Report to the Stockholders" will show

the mode:

He fell off his crane

And his head hit the steel floor and broke like an egg

He lived a couple of hours with his brains bubbling out

And then he died

And the safety clerk made out a report saying

It was carelessness

And the craneman should have known better

From twenty years experience

Than not to watch his step

And slip in some grease on top of his crane

And then the safety clerk told the superintendent

He’d ought to fix that guardrail

As much as one-fourth of Beecher’s poetry is in this mode which, with its

invariable ironic structure showing the discrepancy between the official report and actual

happening, is not my favorite Beecher. All the same, especially taken as a whole, it is a

powerful, highly controlled writing which reveals and identifies with a class and a world

unfamiliar to most readers of contemporary poetry.

From "Homage to a Subversive: Notes Toward Explaining John Beecher." In The

American Poetry Review (1976).