propaganda and the art of the new culture. "Above all things," writes
Chaplin, "I don't want anyone to try to make me out a 'poet'--because
I'm not. I don't think much of these esthetic creatures who condescend
to stoop to our level that we may have the blessings of culture. We'll
manage to make our own--do it in our own way, and stagger through
somehow. . . . These are tremendous times, and sooner or later someone
will come along big enough to sound the right note, and it will be a
rebel note." It is that note which Chaplin has sought to strike, and
that he has succeeded will be the verdict of anyone who has read over
the poems.

Chaplin's work speaks for itself. Some of the poems were written in
Leavenworth Prison and published in the prison paper. Others were
written during the tedious months of the Chicago trial, when the men
were kept in the Cook County jail. Chaplin has had ample time to work
them out. Christmas, 1921, was the fifth consecutive Christmas that
he has spent in prison. The poems bear the impress of the bars, but
they ring with the glad vigor of a free spirit that bars cannot
contain.

The reader of Chaplin's prison poems unavoidably makes three mental
comments:

1. When poems so reserved, so vigorous; so penetrating, so melodious,
so beautiful, come from behind jail bars, it is high time that
thinking men and women awoke to the fate that awaits bold dreamers and
singers under the present order in the United States.

2. Men are not silenced when steel doors clang behind them. Free
spirits are as free behind the bars as they are under the open sky.