Probably it is those distinguished blacklists, and just living in Los Angeles, where everybody is on somebody's blacklist, that has kept Thomas McGrath from his due. For all its tremendous expense of spirit, the Proletarian Thirties produced almost no verse which can be read today without a blush—Edwin Rolfe, Don Gordon, Charles Humboldt, Walter Lowenfels, that's about it. McGrath is a decade younger than most of those people, and, excepting for Lowenfels, more skilled. Further, he is a lot less "cooked." Few of these poems [in New and Selected Poems] are about issues—except the abiding issue of being Thomas McGrath. Poets are most effective in politics when they write-in their own names on all ballots. Whatever his opinions have been, McGrath has always known this. It is the other peoples' opinions which have kept him from being as well known as he deserves, for he is...