ABSTRACT
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murder in 1920 and executed in 1927. The poems written about them during that time are of great interest in relation to three questions: about political poetry as poetry; about political poetry as politics, as a means towards an immediate political end; and about how political poetry containing images drawn from religion is strengthened or weakened by those images. The best recent account of one important kind of political poetry is Michael Thurston's, in Making Something Happen. Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars. Henry Harrison's preface to his Sacco-Vanzetti Anthology of Verse is useful towards that end: Justice has not chuckled up her wide sleeve at two men only, but at the whole world. Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney are also bringing out an anthology of Sacco-Vanzetti poems. On the cost, layout, and typography of the Trent and Cheyney volume, Harrison's anthology cost 25 cents.
