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Kenneth Flexner Fearing (July 28, 1902 – June 26, 1961) was an American poet and novelist. A major poet of the Depression era, he addressed the shallowness and consumerism of American society as he saw it, often by ironically adapting the language of commerce and media.
Although both his novels and his poetry depict the disintegration of middle-class life-styles in an urban mechanized society, Fearing described the conditions that led to the formulation of revolutionary ideas rather than advocating the ideas themselves.
Early in his career, Fearing was pigeonholed as a “proletarian poet,” but avoided taking sides in political debates (something that probably helped at the FWP). When FBI agents asked if he was a Communist, the poet replied: “Not yet.”
With the advent of the Great Depression, he was drawn to the Communist Left, though he remained an irreverent and iconoclastic fellow traveler. His revolutionary and anticapitalist 1935 Poems helped define a dynamic relation between proletarian poetry and experimental modernism.
Dec 2, 2016 · In order to determine if Fearing underwent a stylistic change or merely rehashed his previous poetic successes, this study attempts to perform a textual analysis with a focus on Fearing’s style across the spectrum of his published poetry.
This essay reads Kenneth Fearing's Depression-era poetry as an innovative body of Marxist verse, one that attempts to craft an aesthetic reaction of shock and dis- orientation in the reader.
Kenneth Fearing is considered a minor poet of the 1920s and 30s New York circle of proletarian poets. At his peak, he published a variety of poems that captured the alienating powers of modern society.
