" It is that note which Chaplin has sought to strike, and
that he has succeeded will be the verdict of anyone who has read over
the poems.
Chaplin's work speaks for itself. Some of the poems were written in
Leavenworth Prison and published in the prison paper. Others were
written during the tedious months of the Chicago trial, when the men
were kept in the Cook County jail. Chaplin has had ample time to work
them out. Christmas, 1921, was the fifth consecutive Christmas that
he has spent in prison. The poems bear the impress of the bars, but
they ring with the glad vigor of a free spirit that bars cannot
contain.
The reader of Chaplin's prison poems unavoidably makes three mental
comments:
1. When poems so reserved, so vigorous; so penetrating, so melodious,
so beautiful, come from behind jail bars, it is high time that
thinking men and women awoke to the fate that awaits bold dreamers and
singers under the present order in the United States.
2. Men are not silenced when steel doors clang behind them. Free
spirits are as free behind the bars as they are under the open sky.
The jail, as a gag, is impotent. While it may master the body, it
cannot contain the soul.
3. The new order in America is already finding its voice. Although it
is so young, and so immature, it is speaking with an accent of gifted
authority.
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