Arturo Giovannitti was born in Abruzzi, Italy, January 7, 1884. He studied at the college of his native province and came to New York when he was eighteen years old. Even as a child, Giovannitti had dreamed of America and had “learned upon the knees of his mother and father to reverence, with tears in his eyes, the name of the republic.” With the dream of America as the great liberator in his heart, his first impressions were shattering. What he saw, through the eyes of the laborer, was the whiplash and legal trickery, the few ruling the many, the miseries and exploitation of the helpless. He thought of becoming a preacher, attended theological school; sought a greater outlet for his passion for democracy and became an editor; lectured, wrote pamphlets and worked continually to express “a multitude of men lost in an immensity of silence.”

Although Giovannitti has written several books in Italian, his one English volume is Arrows in the Gale (1914). In an eloquent introduction to the poet’s rough music and rougher mixture of realism and rapture, Helen Keller writes, “He makes us feel the presence of toilers behind tenement walls, behind the machinery they guide.... He finds voice for his message in the sighs, the dumb hopes, the agonies and thwartings of men who are bowed and broken by the monster hands of machines.”

Several of Giovannitti’s poems are in rhyme, but his most characteristic lines move in uplifted prose poems that shape themselves vividly to their subjects. “The Cage,” with its restrained anger, and “The Walker” are typical. “The Walker,” unfortunately too long to quote in its entirety, is remarkable not only as an art-work but as a document; it is a twentieth-century “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” with an intensity and mystical power of which Wilde was incapable.