CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Although frequently ignored by the literary establishment during his lifetime, a self-described "peoples' poet" and outspoken-but-loyal critic of the United States is celebrated posthumously in a new anthology of his work.
The new anthology, "Wicked Times: Selected Poems" (University of Illinois Press) brings together for the first time the best poetry of Aaron Kramer (1921-1997), considered by his co-editors to be one of America's "most compelling and accomplished poets." The book is the latest title in Illinois' American Poetry Recovery Series.
According to Cary Nelson, series editor and co-editor of the new book, "Wicked Times" is a journey through the major events of modern history. Along the way are dozens of poems about events nearly forgotten: Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the industrial tragedy at Bhopal, the war in Grenada. "Kramer opens his heart to Cuba in his poem 'Seven Days' in a gesture against the blockage that teaches us a human lesson we very much need to learn today," Nelson wrote.
Prolific by anyone's standards - Kramer wrote 1,000 poems and translated 500 poems written by other poets, all while holding down day jobs - he focused his energy and talent on fundamental social issues - labor, racism and class struggle. Among his most frequent topics are the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, civil rights and McCarthyism.
"Kramer loved his country deeply, especially his native New York, but he also held his country's feet to the fire when he felt it was behaving badly," said Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The poet also wrote passionately about his beloved New York, his travels, his craft and his wife, Kitty.
Kramer was widely published in his youth and young adulthood, mainly in the Daily Worker and the New Pioneer.
He soon became a recognized figure in Leftist literary circles and earned a devoted following in New York, but as time went on he despaired of reaching a large national audience and receiving wide critical acclaim.
He had reason to despair; he could not conform to changing norms and standards.
Critics abandoned Kramer largely because of his enduring commitment to metered rhyme in the new modernist era where free verse was king. Nelson and co-editor Donald Gilzinger Jr. write that Kramer "adopted traditional meters - favoring iambic trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter - in part to install a radical politics within inherited rhythms. He wanted to radicalize root and branch of our literary tradition, not to abandon it for alternative forms."
At the same time, his main supporters, the American Left, began shunning him, believing that their "natural lineage" was the free verse tradition that began with Whitman. Ironically, the poets and critics who were in the best position to appreciate Kramer's craft "were cultural conservatives who would have found his politics offensive."
Kramer's radical politics - he was for many years a member of the Communist Party of the United States - also isolated him from the mainstream, and he kept a low profile to avoid problems with the FBI. By the late '50s, he abandoned his strong political voice, but reacquired it a decade later. These forces combined to deny him the broad audience he craved.
Still, Nelson and Gilzinger argue that perhaps no other American-born poet of the 20th century "has so successfully adapted traditional forms to the combined projects of progressive social criticism and historical witness. He sought in the music of poetry not only cultural knowledge but also incitement to change."
His universally recognized masterpiece, a 26-part poem titled "Denmark Vesey" (1952), pays homage to an unsuccessful slave rebellion in 1822 led by a charismatic, physically and intellectually imposing African, Denmark Vesey.
"At the height of McCarthyism, when he was blacklisted by every publisher, Kramer sat down and wrote his masterpiece, a towering indictment of racial injustice," Nelson said.
"Then he issued his poem in a privately published pamphlet and it dropped almost entirely into oblivion."
The theme of the poem, the co-editors wrote in their introduction, is that "white civilization is grounded not only in its indifference to the suffering it imposes on its darker brothers but also in a suppression of its own humanity."
Sentenced to death by hanging, Vesey wrote these last words to his fellow mutineers: "What does it matter if we be / remembered or forgotten ...? / Ten thousand guns of liberty / we leave beneath the cotton. / "Ten thousand guns will sing our mass / when we no more can hear it - / and those who dread us in the flesh / may dread us more in spirit."
"Kramer's mastery of rhyme and meter is so complete he's like a musician working with words," Nelson said. But he also was a prophet - an "American Prophet," the editors claim. In "In Wicked Times" (1982), Kramer connects McCarthyism to the Reagan era, but he also prophetically speaks to today's troubled times, as they play out across television screens. The poem ends: "For several weeks I've noticed, / just about half past ten, / a cramp in the pit of the stomach, / a craving to flee the den; / I crawl to the dial - no question: / the times are wicked again."
Kramer cannot be easily categorized, said Gilzinger, an English professor at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, N.Y., and Kramer's bio-bibliographer.
"No peer really comes to mind. ... To my mind he resists categories and comparisons."
According to Gilzinger, Kramer's best political poetry is from the late 1940s to the '50s and includes "Denmark Vesey" and "Roll the Forbidden Drums." His best family or travel poetry springs from the 1970s and '80s and he wrote beautiful family/love poems in the '40s.
Despite all, Kramer was never invited into the literary canon.
"He refused to write academically fashionable poetry," Gilzinger said, noting that it is "the academics who control anthologies and hence the canon."
"Kramer is glaringly and unfairly absent from the canon, something I hope 'Wicked Times' will begin to rectify."