American proletarian poetry movement

Major poets of the movement include Langston Hughes, Kenneth Fearing, Edwin Rolfe, Horace Gregory, and Mike Gold.

[9] During the 1910s, the reporter and poet John Reed, along with other professional writers and leftists in the labor movement, also assisted in strikes and formed plans for workers' theaters.

Marxist in their ideology, although not officially affiliated with the Communist Party, these clubs sought to develop the writing skills of white and blue-collar workers to publish proletarian poetry and literature.

The disenfranchisement and unemployment caused by the economic depression was an influential inspiration for working class artists because it directly exhibited the grievances experienced by many working-class people, and revealed imbalances within the U.S. economy despite the financial success and richness of the 1920s.

Artists such as Langston Hughes, Edwin Rolfe, and Kenneth Fearing, in attempts to find solutions to the Great Depression, looked to socialism, communism, and anarchism, which resulted in these themes and ideas appearing in their literature and poetry.

More than simply reflecting the times, however, the "proletarian" poetry of revolution sought to define a new politics, to suggest subject positions within it, and to help bring about the changes it evoked.

[14] According to critic Nathaniel Mills, Fearing examines the pitfalls of capitalism, describing a well-off executive committing suicide after financial failure.

Songs about the state of culture and the world like Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." expressed both the hardship of the times and the herculean effort it would take to make a change in the life of the working man.

"[24] The punk rock movement can also trace its roots back to the messaging of the proletariat, with bands like The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Dead Kennedys planting the seeds of anti-establishment and disillusionment thought in many youths of the time, which like Guthrie's generation, felt they had no opportunity in the world through nihilistic worldviews.