Vincent Ferrini may be the only American poet to have participated in both the WPA program of the 1930s and the CETA program of the 1970s, the chief federally sponsored efforts to provide meaningful work for the nation's unemployed artists. This is of significance, because the relationships of work to life and life to poetry have been his most persistent themes. Through a long career, he moved from being a proletarian writer--one of the most authentic, if overlooked, examples of the worker-poet in this country--to his own independent visionary status. At each stage he embodied the ages he passed through, at the same time never giving up his earliest commitments. Walter Lowenfels called him "the last surviving Proletarian Poet"--which he certainly is, but he is much more besides.

He was born Venanzio, named after the patron saint of his father's hometown, in Saugus, Massachusetts, across the river...