What is poetry, anyway? Heck if I know.

It’s a question I don’t really think much about anyway. I don’t write poetry, I don’t study poetry. I just try to get in the way of it sometimes and hope it hits me.

What I do know is that poetry isn’t cleverness. Or profundity, philosophy, protest or argument. It’s not meter or rhyme or stanza or syntax; irony, alliteration, symbolism or diction. You can find all that and lots more in poetry, of course; those things are some of the various tools and attributes of particular poetic voices, particular poems. But that’s not what poetry’s made of, not why it hits you so—when you’re lucky enough to get in its way.

This week’s poem, if that’s what it is, hit me like a sudden voice in an empty room when I first read it, half-a-century ago or near. It’s an excerpt from the last speech to the court of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, before he and Nicola Sacco were sentenced to death for the killing of two men in an armed robbery at a shoe factory in Boston in 1920.

Sacco and Vanzetti. To this day, their names are remembered. In death, as in the last years of their brief lives, they hold symbolic significance to many people on the political left around the world, especially older people; next August 23rd will mark a century since their executions. Sacco and Vanzetti are now folklore figures, characters who carry in their deaths the moral to an age-old story of power, prejudice and the poor.

The evidence against the two men as presented to a jury in Massachusetts at the time was sufficient to convict them. In the years since, more evidence has been adduced, especially against Sacco. The historical consensus (there are dissenters) is that Sacco was almost certainly guilty, although Vanzetti may have been innocent. But it is the conduct of the police investigation and the trial, and the fury of bigotry that engulfed their case, that sparked outrage and protests across our country and around the world. How Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted and killed by the state of Massachusetts—that was and is the story.

They were Italian immigrants and avowed anarchists. In post-World War I America, that meant they were utterly despised by much of the country, including the judge in their case, Webster Thayer. In the middle of the trial, Thayer told a friend at their country club, “I’ll get those Bolsheviki bastards good and proper. I’ll get those guys hanged.” The Russian epithet to describe the Italian defendants is ridiculous, in a very 2020s way.

But the judge was simply echoing a widespread sentiment (“ALLEGED RED LITERATURE FOUND IN VANZETTI’S ROOM,” fulminated The Boston Globe), and the hatred of Sacco and Vanzetti wasn’t only about the defendants’ political beliefs—though their beliefs alone, of course, could not and should not be grounds for conviction. It wasn’t even about the cold-blooded viciousness of the crimes they were charged with. They were Italians, and poor. Their English was broken (though, as we’ll see, capable of poetic beauty and power). They were olive-skinned and, in so many ways, aliens.

The two men were among the millions of Italian immigrants living in poverty and infuriated by what they saw as the exploitation of workers by America’s plutoctrats. And so they were drawn into anarchist meetings, labor activism, and streetcorner speechmaking, advocating the violent overthrow of the US government. All that was bad enough. Their ethnicity made it worse. It was a time when Italian laborers and their families were seen by many of the native-born as less than white and unfit for America; when what had been the fairly widespread practice of allowing immigrant non-citizens to vote was rapidly being repealed (The Washington Post had editorialized at the turn of the century about the “marked and increasing deterioration in the quality of immigration”); and when Italians were being lynched, sometimes because they were mistaken for Black Americans. In 1924, while the Sacco and Vanzetti case was on appeal and the focus of fierce debate between liberals and anti-immigration conservatives, Congress passed the most restrictive immigration legislation in our history. Republican Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, a sponsor of the bill, boasted after it became law, “The racial composition of America thus is made permanent.”

If all this sounds familiar—it is. Grimly so.

On April 9, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to die. Before Judge Thayer pronounced their sentence, each man addressed the court, and the world. Vanzetti’s speech was so powerful in his slightly broken English, so beautifully and universally idealistic, it soon became a touchstone of the left. And a decade later a now-forgotten writer and anthologist named Seldon Rodman shaped some of Vanzetti’s powerful words in that speech into poetic lines and put them in his 1938 “A New Anthology of Modern Poetry,” published by The Modern Library.

That’s where I found Vanzetti’s words, as a teenager, decades later, in our family’s library. That’s where they hit me. I still have the book.

Rodman’s anthology was a Christmas gift from my mom to my dad in 1943, when he was in the Army, stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia; later, he served in the Pacific theater as a paratrooper fighting in the Philippines and Okinawa. I’ve kept this book not so much for the poetry, but for my mother’s inscription:

My mom’s funny-looking “M”s always warm my heart. The bookplate came years later, and shows their hands; our house; the old Sears, Roebuck building on Chicago’s West Side, where he worked; and DePaul University, where they met.

I have talk a great deal of myself

but I even forgot to name Sacco.

Sacco too is a worker,

from his boyhood a skilled worker, lover of work,

with a good job and pay,

a bank account, a good and lovely wife,

two beautiful children and a neat little home

at the verge of a wood, near a brook.

.

Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man;

a man, love of nature, and mankind;

a man who gave all, who sacrifice all

to the cause of liberty and to his love for mankind:

money, rest, mundane ambition,

his own wife, his children, himself

and his own life.

.

Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate.

He and I have never brought a morsel

of bread to our mouths, from our childhood to today

which has not been gained by the sweat of our brows.

Never…

.

Oh, yes, I may be more witful, as some have put it;

I am a better babbler than he is, but many, many times

in hearing his heartful voice ringing a faith sublime,

in considering his supreme sacrifice, remembering his heroism,

I felt small in the presence of his greatness

and found myself compelled to fight back

from my eyes the tears,

and quanch my heart

trobling to my throat to not weep before him:

this man called thief and assassin and doomed.

.

But Sacco’s name will live in the hearts of the people

and in their gratitude when Katzmann’s bones

and yours will be dispersed by time;

when your name, his name, your laws, institutions,

and your false god are but a dim rememoring

of a cursed past in which man was wolf

to the man…

.

If it had not been for these thing

I might have live out my life

talking at street corners to scorning men.

I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure.

Now we are not a failure.

This is our career and our triumph. Never

in our full life could we hope to do such work

for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding

of man, as now we do by accident.

Our words, our lives, our pains—nothing!

The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fishpeddler—

all! That last moment belongs to us—

that agony is our triumph.