Page:Poems for Workers - ed. Manuel Gomez (1925).djvu/5



This anthology of poems for workers is, I think, the only one of its kind in the English language. Symposiums have been made of poems "about workers" and there have been a number of collections of poetry and prose gathered together under the general all-embracing head of "literature and art of the humanist thinkers of the world"—notably the well-known volume entitled "The Cry for Social Justice," edited by Upton Sinclair, which includes the chance writings on social justice of such anti-proletarian figures as Bismarck, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, John D. Rockefeller, Rudyard Kipling and even Hall Caine. The poems in the present booklet center upon the life, struggles and revolutionary movement of the working class. They are in fact an indivisible part of the working class struggle. Originally written for and directed to the working class, they are here collected for working class readers.

For the most part, the anthology consists of poems which I have seen here and there in labor periodicals and which I have cut out and saved over a period of years. The selection is therefore