Class in American Literature

It's Das Kapital. Trust me.

Over at the blog Big Other, Amber Sparks raises the question of class (specifically the working class) in American literature: “I worry about the relative absence of workers or work or people without money depicted in literature. I worry that most of the people without money in literature are young privileged students working crappy summer jobs who call themselves “poor.” I worry that the only books that include working-class characters are books about dysfunctional families, or jail, or criminals, or drugs, or teen pregnancy. I worry that when I bring shit like this up, other writers will roll their eyes and peg me as a dour old Marxist relic, clutching my copy of Das Kapital and shouting about production for use.”

Of course, I immediately began thinking of poetry that could be considered working-class. How would a working-class poetry look? What would its topics be? Its themes and motifs? What types of forms would it take? Out of what lineage would it arise? Does attendance at an Ivy League school disqualify a poet? Effectively rub out those social ties to their working roots? Would it resemble the labor poems of mid-century Chicago? Bukowski's beer-stained lines? Or would it recall John “Junkets” Keats, who was razzed for his accent in college (like I was)?

This goes on and on. There are more complications when considering issues of class than there is clarity. And there are poets out there, all over, who grew up on American Chop Suey and McDonalds $1 Happy Meals every Tuesday; who dodged bill collectors for parents eternally “in the bathroom;” who bought Christmas presents in October, on layaway, “so Santa Clause knows what to get you.” Who were raised by a hobnob collection of family, babysitters, and neighbors, and spent weekends accompanying one parent or the other to their second (or third) jobs.

But, is it there in the poetry? Could it be said that, for example, Robert Pinsky's translation of The Inferno contains some element of his blue collar upbringing? Is it in his poems that don't set a scene from working-class New Jersey? This is not meant as an accusation. It's an honest question. Do we find Keats' lower-class roots in his gorgeous poems? I would ask the same of my work and I have no idea what the answer might be. It might not matter at all — but, I don't know. It feels to me like this matters. But that might be a product of justifying the difficulties. Or maybe justifying such pointless, meaningless difficulties is that element of a working-class life to be found in poetry.

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“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”
by John Keats

My spirit is too weak — mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time — with a billowy main —
A sun — a shadow of a magnitude.