Various History

Hatch Act of 1939

The Hatch Act of 1939, officially An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, is a United States federal law whose main provision prohibits employees in the executive branch of the federal government, except the president, vice-president, and certain designated high-level officials of that branch, from engaging in partisan political activity. The law was named for Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico. It was most recently amended in 2012.

Background

Widespread allegations that local Democratic Party politicians used employees of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the congressional elections of 1938 provided the immediate impetus for the passage of the Hatch Act. Criticism centered on Kentucky,[1] Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. In Pennsylvania, Republicans and dissident Democrats publicized evidence that Democratic politicians were consulted on the appointment of WPA administrators and case workers and that they used WPA jobs to gain unfair political advantages.[2] In 1938, a series of newspaper articles exposed WPA patronage and political contributions in return for employment, prompting an investigation by the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee, headed by Sen. Morris Sheppard, a Texas Democrat.

Despite that investigation's inconclusive findings, many in both parties determined to take action against the growing power of the WPA and its chief administrator, Harry Hopkins, an intimate of the president. The Act was sponsored by Senator Carl Hatch, a Democrat from New Mexico. At the time, Roosevelt was struggling to purge the Democratic party of its more conservative members who were increasingly aligned with the administration's Republican opponents. The president considered vetoing the legislation or allowing it to become law without his signature, but instead signed it on the last day he could do so. His signing message welcomed the legislation as if he had called for it and emphasized the protection his administration would provide for political expression on the part of public employees.

Provisions

The 1939 Act forbade the intimidation or bribery of voters and restricts political campaign activities by federal employees. It prohibits using any public funds designated for relief or public works for electoral purposes. It forbade officials paid with federal funds from using promises of jobs, promotion, financial assistance, contracts, or any other benefit to coerce campaign contributions or political support. It provided that persons below the policy-making level in the executive branch of the federal government must not only refrain from political practices that would be illegal for any citizen, but must abstain from "any active part" in political campaigns, using this language to specify those who are exempt:[5]
(i) an employee paid from an appropriation for the Executive Office of the President; or
(ii) an employee appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, whose position is located within the United States, who determines policies to be pursued by the United States in the nationwide administration of Federal laws.

The language was crafted so that the Secretary of State was covered by the Act's restrictions on political activity.

The act also precluded federal employees from membership in "any political organization which advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government,"[6] a provision meant to prohibit membership in organizations on the far left and far right, such as the German-American Bund and the Communist Party USA.

An amendment on July 19, 1940 extended the Act to certain employees of state and local governments whose positions are primarily paid for by federal funds. It has been interpreted to bar political activity on the part of employees of state agencies administering federal unemployment insurance programs and appointed local law enforcement agency officials with oversight of federal grant funds. The Hatch Act bars state and local government employees from running for public office if any federal funds support the position, even if the position is funded almost entirely with local funds.

The Merit Systems Protection Board and its Office of Special Counsel are responsible for enforcement of the Hatch Act.

Supreme Court challenges

The Supreme Court has several times declined to hear challenges to the act and has twice upheld its constitutionality. In a 1947 case brought by the CIO, a divided court found that Congress had properly exercised its authority as long as it had not affected voting rights. Justice William O. Douglas objected to the assertion that "clean politics" required the act's restrictions: "it would hardly seem to be imperative to muzzle millions of citizens because some of them, if left to their constitutional freedoms, might corrupt the political process."[10] In 1973, in a case brought by the National Association of Letter Carriers, a 6 to 3 decision found the act neither too broad nor unclear. The court's three most liberal justices, Douglas, William J. Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall, dissented. Douglas wrote: "It is no concern of government what an employee does in his or her spare time, whether religion, recreation, social work or politics is his hobby, unless what he or she does impairs efficiency or other facets of the merits of his job."

Amendments

In 1975, the House passed legislation allowing federal employees to participate in partisan elections and run for office, but the Senate took no action. In 1976, Democrats who controlled Congress had sought to win support by adding protections against the coercion of employees by their superiors and federal employee unions had supported the legislation. It passed the House on a vote of 241 to 164 and the Senate on a vote of 54 to 36. President Ford vetoed the legislation on April 12. He noted that coercion could be too subtle for the law to eliminate and that the Supreme Court had said in 1973 that the Hatch Act had achieved "a delicate balance between fair and effective government and the First Amendment rights of individual employees." President Carter proposed similar legislation in 1977.[14] A proposed amendment to permit federal workers to participate in political campaigns passed the House on a 305 to 112 vote in 1987. In 1990 a similar bill passed the House on a vote of 334 to 87 and the Senate on a vote of 67 to 30. President George H.W. Bush vetoed the legislation,[16] which the House voted to override 327 to 93 and the Senate sustained on a vote of 65 to 35, with 55 Democrats and 10 Republicans voting to override and 35 Republicans supporting the president's veto.

In 1993 the advocates for removing or modifying restrictions on the political activities of federal employees succeeded in enacting the Hatch Act Reform Amendments of 1993 (107 Stat. 1001) that removed the prohibition on participation in "political management or political campaigns." Federal employees are still forbidden to use their authority to affect the results of an election. They are also forbidden to run for office in a partisan election, to solicit or receive political contributions, and to engage in political activities while on duty or on federal property.

President Barack Obama signed the Hatch Act Modernization Act of 2012 on December 28, 2012. It modified penalties under the Hatch Act to allow for disciplinary actions in addition to removal for federal employees; clarified the applicability to the District of Columbia of provisions that cover state and local governments; limited the prohibition on state and local employees running for elective office to employees whose salary is paid completely by federal loans or grants.

Applicability to U.S. military personnel

The Hatch Act does not apply to actively serving uniformed members of the U.S. armed forces, although it does apply to Department of Defense civil servants, as well as Department of Homeland Security civil servants in direct support of the United States Coast Guard. Uniformed personnel are subject to Department of Defense Directive 1344.10 (DoDD 1344.10), Political Activities by Members of the Armed Forces, and the spirit and intent of that directive is effectively the same as that of the Hatch Act for Federal civil servants. By agreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security, DoDD 1344.10 also applies to uniformed personnel of the Coast Guard at all times, whether it is operating as a service in the Department of Homeland Security or as part of the Navy under the Department of Defense.

As a directive, DoDD 1344.10 is considered to be in the same category as an order or regulation, and military personnel violating its provisions can be considered in violation of Article 92 (Failure to obey order or regulation) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Recent events
In 2006, the Utah Democratic Party challenged the candidacy of Ogden City Police Chief Jon Greiner for State Senate. The challenge was upheld by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel because the year prior the Ogden City Police Department received a federal grant to help pay for bulletproof vests. Jon Greiner appealed the decision, remained on the ballot, and won the election. He now serves as a Utah State Senator while the results of the appeal are unknown.
In January 2007, the United States Office of Special Counsel (OSC) announced the results of investigations into whether certain events during the election campaigns of 2004 and 2006 violated the Hatch Act.[23] It found no violation when Kennedy Space Center officials allowed Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign to use a NASA facility for a 2004 campaign event, because no government employees worked at the facility in question. It found streaming the event to NASA employees and contractors violated the Hatch Act.
It reviewed a 2006 speech by NASA Administrator Dr. Michael D. Griffin in which he appeared to endorse Representative Tom DeLay for re-election. It determined that he "should have exercised better judgment" and took no further action.

In June 2007, the OSC found that Lurita Alexis Doan, Administrator of the General Services Administration, violated the Hatch Act when she took part in a video conference with Karl Rove and other White House officials, and sent letters asking how to help Republican politicians get elected.
In November 2007, Terre Haute, Indiana, mayor, Kevin Burke, challenged the candidacy of mayor-elect Duke Bennett under provisions of the Act. In November 2008, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that Bennett, who took office after a Vigo County, Indiana, judge ruled that he was eligible to serve, was ineligible under the terms of the Act. The ruling was nonbinding, pending Bennett's appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court.
On May 6, 2008, FBI agents raided OSC offices and the home office of its director, Scott Bloch. The raids related to an investigation into allegations that Bloch's office have attempted to obstruct justice by hiring an outside company to delete computer files beyond recovery in order to prevent authorities from proving Bloch had violated the Hatch Act by retaliating against whistle-blowers in his office, an independent U.S. government agency "charged with protecting the rights of government whistle-blowers".
On October 6, 2008, federal investigators announced that they were investigating Sheriff Mike Scott of Lee County, Florida, for possible violations of the Hatch Act. The previous day, Sheriff Scott, in uniform, spoke on stage at a rally for presidential candidate John McCain.
On November 18, 2008, Vanderburgh County, Indiana, Commission President Jeff Korb filed an injunction against Steven Melcher, who defeated Korb in the November 4, 2008, general election, citing the Hatch Act. Melcher is the facilities manager for the Community Action Program of Evansville (CAPE), an agency that administers Head Start, LIHEAP heating assistance and Section 8 housing assistance among other federally funded programs in a three-county area of southwestern Indiana.
In 2009 two scholars urged Congress to consider tightening the Hatch Act's restrictions.
On March 5, 2009, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced H.R. 1345, the District of Columbia Hatch Act Reform Act of 2009, into the U.S. Congress's House of Representatives. The bill would amend the Hatch Act to include the District of Columbia within the definition of "state" with respect to political activities of certain state and local employees; and (2) remove provisions specifically applicable to employees of government of the District of Columbia.
On September 13, 2012, the OSC charged Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius with violating the Hatch Act by making a political speech during an official government event. Sebelius later said she had made a mistake and that the error was "technical" in nature.

Current restrictions

(See U.S. Office of Special Counsel "Hatch Act for Federal Employees")

Permitted and prohibited activities for employees who may participate in partisan political activity

These federal and D.C. employees may:
be candidates for public office in nonpartisan elections
register and vote as they choose
assist in voter registration drives
express opinions about candidates and issues
contribute money to political organizations
attend political fundraising functions
attend and be active at political rallies and meetings
join and be an active member of a political party or club
sign nominating petitions
campaign for or against referendum questions, constitutional amendments, municipal ordinances
campaign for or against candidates in partisan elections
make campaign speeches for candidates in partisan elections
distribute campaign literature in partisan elections
hold office in political clubs or parties

These federal and D.C. employees may not:
use official authority or influence to interfere with an election
solicit or discourage political activity of anyone with business before their agency
solicit or receive political contributions (may be done in certain limited situations by federal labor or other employee organizations)
be candidates for public office in partisan elections
engage in political activity while: on duty
in a government office
wearing an official uniform
using a government vehicle

wear partisan political buttons on duty

Agencies and employees prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity

Employees of the following agencies (or agency components), or in the following categories, are subject to more extensive restrictions on their political activities than employees in other Departments and agencies:
Administrative law judges (positions described at 5 U.S.C. § 5372)
Central Intelligence Agency
Contract Appeals Boards (positions described at 5 U.S.C. § 5372a)
Criminal Division (Department of Justice)
Defense Intelligence Agency
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Elections Commission
Merit Systems Protection Board
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
National Security Agency
National Security Council
Office of Criminal Investigation (Internal Revenue Service)
Office of Investigative Programs (Customs Service)
Office of Law Enforcement (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives)
United States Office of Special Counsel
Secret Service
Senior Executive Service

(career positions described at 5 U.S.C. § 3132(a)(4))

Permitted and prohibited activities for employees who may not participate in partisan political activity[edit]

These federal employees may:
register and vote as they choose
assist in voter registration drives
express opinions about candidates and issues
participate in campaigns where none of the candidates represent a political party
contribute money to political organizations or attend political fund raising functions
attend political rallies and meetings
join political clubs or parties
sign nominating petitions
campaign for or against referendum questions, constitutional amendments, municipal ordinances

These federal employees may not:
be candidates for public office in partisan elections
campaign for or against a candidate or slate of candidates in partisan elections
make campaign speeches
collect contributions or sell tickets to political fund raising functions
distribute campaign material in partisan elections
organize or manage political rallies or meetings
hold office in political clubs or parties
circulate nominating petitions
work to register voters for one party only
wear political buttons at work



Further reading
Dorothy Ganfield Fowler, "Precursors of the Hatch Act,: Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 47, no. 2 (Sept. 1960), pp. 247-262. In JSTOR

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43630.pdf

 

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United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75 (1947), is a 4-to-3 ruling by the United States Supreme Court which held that the Hatch Act of 1939, as amended in 1940, does not violate the First, Fifth, Ninth, or Tenth amendments to U.S. Constitution.


Background

Beginning at the start of the 20th century, several unions (such as the National Federation of Federal Employees, American Federation of Government Employees, and the United Federal Workers of America) began representing employees working for the federal government of the United States. The leadership of the United Federal Workers of America (UFWA) was leftist. The leadership was militant in its advocacy of the rights of its members and most of the national and local union leadership advocated leftist ideals; associated with left-wing intellectuals, activists, and political people; and supported left-wing organizations.[2] This led many politicians and others to believe the organization was Communist-controlled.

The political leanings of the UWFA led to passage of two pieces of legislation intended to restrict its political activities.[2] In June 1938, Congress passed a rider to appropriations legislation which prevented the federal government from making payments (such as salaries) to any person or organization which advocated the overthrow of the federal government (as many communist organizations at the time proposed).[3] In 1939, Congress passed the Hatch Act of 1939, which restricted political campaign activities by federal employees. A provision of the Hatch Act made it illegal for the federal government to employ anyone who advocated the overthrow of the federal government.[3] The UFWA immediately hired lawyer Lee Pressman to challenge the constitutionality of the Hatch Act.[4] Various individual employees of the federal government, some of whom were members of the United Public Workers of America, sought an injunction against the second sentence of §9(a) of the Hatch Act, and a declaration that the Act was unconstitutional.

On April 25, 1946, the State, County, and Municipal Workers of America (SCMWA) merged with the UFWA to form the United Public Workers of America.[6][7][8] Joining the new organization were several local unions which had been expelled from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) for being communist-dominated.[9] Congress repeatedly investigated the union for violations of the Hatch Act and prohibitions on advocacy of the right to strike. In January 1947, the House of Representatives Committee on Campaign Expenditures reported that it had found evidence that the UPWA (and other unions) had violated the Federal Corrupt Practices Act by failing to report expenditures in support of various political parties and candidates for federal office.

In the 19th century, American courts had established the "doctrine of privilege." This legal doctrine concluded that public employment was a privilege, not a right, and subsequently significant restrictions could be placed on public employees that could not be constitutionally tolerated in the private sector.[11] By the middle of the 20th century, however, the doctrine of privilege had been markedly weakened. Abuse of the privilege had led to widespread corruption; the tolerance of sexual harassment, racism, religious discrimination, and gender discrimination; and workplace abuse (such as forcing employees to buy goods and services from a supervisor, or forcing employees to run errands for the supervisor).[12] The courts were becoming less and less tolerant of the doctrine of privilege.

Decision

A significantly divided Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of privilege and the Hatch Act. Associate Justice Stanley Forman Reed wrote the decision for the majority.

Majority holding

Justice Reed initially dealt with an issue which arose due to the untimely filing of the appeal, and concluded the Court could hear the case.

On the substantive issues raised, Justice Reed noted that none of the appellants, except George P. Poole, had violated the provisions of the Hatch Act.[15] Since the federal courts do not issue advisory rulings, Reed dismissed the issues raised by all appellants except Poole.[16] Poole, however, had been charged with a violation of the Hatch Act, and an order for his dismissal entered by the government. (He was a ward executive committeeman for a political party, acted as a poll worker on election day, and acted as a paymaster for other poll workers engaged by that political party.)

Poole contended that the Hatch Act violated the Ninth and Tenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.[18] Justice Reed also asserted (without explanation) that the Hatch Act implicated rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, and by implication the due process protections of the Fifth Amendment as well.[19] Justice Reed found unpersuasive Poole's claim that off-hours political activity was different from such activity conducted during working hours. "The influence of political activity by government employees, if evil in its effects on the service, the employees or people dealing with them, is hardly less so because that activity takes place after hours."[19] Reed next concluded that no rights guaranteed by the Constitution are absolute, and that all rights "are subject to the elemental need for order without which the guarantees of civil rights to others would be a mockery." But how should the rights of the Ninth and Tenth amendments be balanced against those of the First and Fifth? Justice Reed found the majority's answer in the fact that the Ninth and Tenth amendments are reserved, rather than enumerated powers, and so carry less weight than enumerated powers.[1] He wrote:
The powers granted by the Constitution to the Federal Government are subtracted from the totality of sovereignty originally in the states and the people. Therefore, when objection is made that the exercise of a federal power infringes upon rights reserved by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, the inquiry must be directed toward the granted power under which the action of the Union was taken. If granted power is found, necessarily the objection of invasion of those rights, reserved by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, must fail.
Justice Reed then used a traditional balancing test to weight the infringement of First and Fifth amendment rights against "a congressional enactment to protect a democratic society against the supposed evil of political partisanship by classified employees of government." That balance had been decided previously by the Court in Ex parte Curtis, 106 U.S. 371 (1882), and the infringements upheld.[21] Without providing evidence or explanation, Reed asserted that the dangers posed by partisan political activity have only worsened since Curtis.[22] Justice Reed next applied the balancing test to the doctrine of privilege. Reed noted that in United States v. Wurzbach, 280 U.S. 396 (1930), the Court had upheld the doctrine of privilege in a single sentence against rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Poole had argued that his actions were nonpartisan, however. The majority concluded that since Congress had seen fit to find danger in even nonpartisan political activity by federal workers, the Court would not dispute it.[24] Reed note: "[Such restrictions have] the approval of long practice by the Commission, court decisions upon similar problems and a large body of informed public opinion. Congress and the administrative agencies have authority over the discipline and efficiency of the public service. When actions of civil servants in the judgment of Congress menace the integrity and the competency of the service, legislation to forestall such danger and adequate to maintain its usefulness is required. The Hatch Act is the answer of Congress to this need. We cannot say with such a background that these restrictions are unconstitutional."

The constitutionality of the Hatch Act was upheld, and the judgment of the district court affirmed.

Frankfurter's concurrence

Justice Felix Frankfurter concluded that the Supreme Court should not have accepted the case, as the appeal had been untimely filed.[25] Compelled to accept jurisdiction, however, by the majority, he concurred with the majority's reasoning on the substantive issues.

Black's dissent

Justice Hugo Black noted that the §9 of the statute made it illegal for federal workers to engage in political activity, and yet explicitly protected the right of workers to "express their opinions on all political subjects and candidates."[26] Black also refused to accept the conclusions to be drawn from the doctrine of privilege: "Had this measure deprived five million farmers or a million businessmen of all right to participate in elections, because Congress thought that federal farm or business subsidies might prompt some of them to exercise, or be susceptible to, a corrupting influence on politics or government, I would not sustain such an Act on the ground that it could be interpreted so as to apply only to some of them."[27] Black concluded that, on its face, the Hatch Act and implementing civil service regulations were unconstitutionally overbroad (a fact even the government had admitted in its brief, Black said).

Black provided a ringing defense of the right to freedom of speech.[29] He dismissed out of hand the majority's reliance on Ex parte Curtis and United States v. Wurzbach (concluding that they did not support the conclusions the majority came to), and argued that corruption could be dealt with without resorting to the "muzzling" of six million people.

Rutledge's dissent

Justice Wiley Blount Rutledge concurred with Justice Black's dissent regarding Poole.[25] He concurred with the majority that the case was not ripe regarding the other appellants.

Douglas' dissent

Justice William O. Douglas took issue with the majority on two grounds. First, he would not have dismissed the claims of the 12 other appellants as unripe, arguing that consideration of a declaratory judgment in the case would be proper.[31] Second, Douglas argued that Poole's position as an industrial worker at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was an important distinction. Administrative and political personnel may be susceptible to pressure and corruption via political activity, Douglas wrote, but industrial workers are "as remote from contact with the public or from policy making or from the functioning of the administrative process as a charwoman."[32] Douglas concurred with Justice Black's dissent that the Hatch Act was overbroad in its application and approach to the problem of corruption.

Assessment

United Public Workers v. Mitchell was the last time the Supreme Court expansively applied the doctrine of privilege. The Supreme Court largely rejected the doctrine in Wieman v. Updegraff, 344 U.S. 183 (1952), and a number of high court decisions in areas such as nonpartisan speech, due process, search and seizure, the right to marry, the right to bear children, equal protection, education, and receipt of public benefits over the next two decades continued to undermine the concept.[34] Although the Supreme Court later reaffirmed United Public Workers v. Mitchell in 1973 in United States Civil Service Commission v. National Association of Letter Carriers, 413 U.S. 548 (1973), it did so narrowly on the grounds that permitting public employees to engage in political activity was dangerous.

United Public Workers v. Mitchell is one of only seven Supreme Court decisions which addressed the Ninth or Tenth amendments prior to 1965.[36] It is the only one to do so in a substantive way.

Legal commentators have taken issues with the decision's characterization of the Ninth and Tenth amendments. One scholar has characterized the two amendments as a way to "reserve sovereign power rather than recogniz[e] any particular individual right", and as a means of emphasizing that the federal government's powers were enumerated, specific, and limited. This perspective leads to a criticism of United Public Workers v. Mitchell for seeing the amendments as subordinate to the enumerated powers in the Constitution. Another legal scholar has criticized Justice Reed's conception of the Ninth and Tenth amendments as "dubious" because: 1) It equates the meaning of the Ninth with the Tenth (which is clearly incorrect); 2) It leaves the two amendments completely subordinate to all enumerated powers and therefore meaningless; 3) It creates a situation where the Ninth Amendment interprets the Tenth Amendment, strengthening the Tenth Amendment and eviscerating Justice Reed's conclusion that the two amendments are subordinate.

It may also be that the decision is in direct conflict with the intent of the Founding Fathers. In 1841, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, in a directive to heads of the federal agencies condemning the use of civil servants to political advantage, warned:
It is not intended that any officer shall be restrained in the free and proper expression and maintenance of his opinions respecting public men or public measures, or in the exercise to the fullest degree of the constitutional right of suffrage. But persons employed under the Government and paid for their services out of the public Treasury are not expected to take an active or officious part in attempts to influence the minds or votes of others, such conduct being deemed inconsistent with the spirit of the Constitution and the duties of public agents acting under it; and the President is resolved, so far as depends upon him, that while the exercise of the elective franchise by the people shall be free from undue influences of official station and authority, opinion shall also be free among the officers and agents of the Government.
One legal scholar has concluded that congressional debate in 1791 supports Webster's opinion, not the decision by Justice Reed in United Public Workers.



Further reading
Rosenbloom, David H. "Public Personnel Administration and the Constitution: An Emergent Approach." Public Administration Review. 35:1 (1975).
Wormuth, Francis D. "The Hatch Act Cases." Western Political Quarterly. 1:2 (1948).

 

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United States Civil Service Commission v. National Association of Letter Carriers, 413 U.S. 548 (1973), is a ruling by the United States Supreme Court which held that the Hatch Act of 1939 does not violate the First Amendment, and its implementing regulations are not unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.


Background

In 1939, the United States Congress passed the Hatch Act, which barred federal employees from taking part in political campaigns. In United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75 (1947), the U.S. Supreme Court had held that the Act did not violate the First, Fifth, Ninth, or Tenth amendments to U.S. Constitution.[1] The same day, in Oklahoma v. United States Civil Service Commission, 330 U.S. 127 (1947), the Court rejected a similar Tenth Amendment challenge to the Act.

In 1971, six federal employees, the National Association of Letter Carriers, and six local Democratic and Republican political committees sought an injunction against the enforcement of the Hatch Act on the grounds that the law violated their First Amendment rights and was unconstitutionally vague.

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that United Public Workers v. Mitchell had left the constitutionality of the term "political activity" open to question.[3] The District Court then found that the term was impermissibly vague and overbroad. The District Court then argued that, even if United Public Workers had foreclosed any discussion of the constitutionality of the term, subsequent Supreme Court decisions regarding the rights of federal workers had undermined the decision and left the door open for the District Court to re-examine the Act's constitutionality.

The federal government appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted certiorari.

Decision

Majority opinion

Associate Justice Byron White wrote the decision for the majority.

Justice White began by noting that while the plaintiffs in United Public Workers had only made vague assertions of the kind of political activity they wished to engage in, the plaintiffs in the present case had clearly outlined the activities they believed were unconstitutionally barred by the Hatch Act. White then "unhesitatingly reaffirm[ed] the Mitchell holding". White reviewed the lengthy history in the U.S. of barring political activity by federal workers, a practice which extended to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, and emphasized the considered and lengthy history of the conclusion that such activity was highly dangerous to the proper functioning of government and democracy.

But, citing Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563, 568 (1968), White noted that the government has a special and unique interest in regulating the speech of federal workers.[8] This special interest is not in question; rather, balancing this interest against the rights of workers is the key. Calling "the impartial execution of the laws" the "great end of Government", White asserted that not only is the actual impartiality of government but its appearance both justify the infringement of the rights of federal workers.

White next turned to the issue of vagueness. White reviewed the adoption of the 1939 Act, the rulemaking of the United States Civil Service Commission between 1939 and 1940 (which defined many specific political acts barred by the 1939 legislation), and the adoption by Congress of amendments to the Hatch Act in 1940 which strictly limited the Civil Service Commission's rulemaking powers regarding the Act (as amended) but which also incorporated (almost, but not quite) the rules already promulgated by the Commission.[10] White concluded that these "prohibitions sufficiently clearly carve out the prohibited political conduct from the expressive activity permitted by the prior section to survive any attack on the ground of vagueness".[11]

The judgment of the District Court was reversed.

Douglas' dissent

Associate Justice William O. Douglas dissented, joined by Associate Justices William J. Brennan, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall.

Douglas rejected the majority's conclusion that the Hatch Act of 1939 (as amended in 1940) was constitutionally not vague. He noted that more than 3,000 rulings of the Civil Service Commission had been made between the first adoption of the prohibition on political activity in 1886 and 1940, along with 800 decisions since then.[12] The sheer mass of decisions indicated that the legislation's phrase "political activity" was vague. But Douglas also noted that many of the decisions and rulings were themselves unclear and vague.[13] "The chilling effect of these vague and generalized prohibitions," Douglas concluded, "is so obvious as not to need elaboration."

Douglas observed that the Supreme Court had already abandoned the "doctrine of privilege" defense for the Hatch Act, and had only in 1972 held "that Government employment may not be denied or penalized "on a basis that infringes [the employee's] constitutionally protected interests -- especially, his interest in freedom of speech."[14] Douglas equated freedom of speech with freedom of religion, and concluded that "speech, assembly, and petition are as deeply embedded in the First Amendment as proselytizing a religious cause."[15] If the Court would not condition public employment based on a religious test, it should not therefore base employment on a political test (e.g., nonpartisanship).

Douglas agreed with the District Court that a number of Supreme Court decisions since United Public Workers had called into question the Hatch Act's constitutionality.[16] For Douglas, the majority's long discussion of the 1940 amendments boiled down to one thing: Congress had refused to delegate to the Civil Service Commission the authority to regulate First Amendment rights, and this fatally left the Act uninterpreted and thus unconstitutionally vague.

Douglas would have struck down the Act as "self-imposed censorship imposed on many nervous people who live on narrow economic margins."

Assessment

In the 19th century, American courts had established the "doctrine of privilege." This legal doctrine concluded that public employment was a privilege, not a right, and subsequently significant restrictions could be placed on public employees that could not be constitutionally tolerated in the private sector.[19] By the middle of the 20th century, however, the doctrine of privilege had been markedly weakened. Abuse of the privilege had led to widespread corruption; the tolerance of sexual harassment, racism, religious discrimination, and gender discrimination; and workplace abuse (such as forcing employees to buy goods and services from a supervisor, or forcing employees to run errands for the supervisor).[20] The courts were becoming less and less tolerant of the doctrine of privilege.

United Public Workers v. Mitchell was the last time the Supreme Court expansively applied the doctrine of privilege. The Supreme Court largely rejected the doctrine in Wieman v. Updegraff, 344 U.S. 183 (1952), and a number of high court decisions in areas such as nonpartisan speech, due process, search and seizure, the right to marry, the right to bear children, equal protection, education, and receipt of public benefits over the next two decades continued to undermine the concept. Although the Supreme Court reaffirmed United Public Workers v. Mitchell in United States Civil Service Commission v. National Association of Letter Carriers, it abandoned its reliance on the doctrine of privilege and did so narrowly on the grounds that permitting public employees to engage in political activity was dangerous to democracy.

 

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Smith Act


The Alien Registration Act of 1940 (Smith Act), 76th United States Congress, 3d session, ch. 439, 54 Stat. 670, 18 U.S.C. § 2385 is a United States federal statute enacted June 29, 1940, that set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government and required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the government.

Approximately 215 people were indicted under the legislation, including alleged communists, Trotskyists, and fascists. Prosecutions under the Smith Act continued until a series of United States Supreme Court decisions in 1957 reversed a number of convictions under the Act as unconstitutional. The statute has been amended several times.


Legislative history

The U.S. government has attempted on several occasions to regulate speech in wartime, beginning with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. During and following World War I, a series of statutes addressed a complex of concerns that included enemy espionage and disruption, anti-war activism, and the radical ideologies of anarchism and Bolshevism, all identified with immigrant communities. Congressional investigations of 'extremist' organizations in 1935 resulted in calls for the renewal of those statutes. The Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 addressed a particular concern, but not the general problem.[1] As U.S. involvement in the European war seemed ever more likely, the possibility of betrayal from within gained currency. The Spanish Civil War had given this possibility a name, a fifth column, and the popular press in the U.S. blamed internal subversion (especially by Communists opposed to the war against Hitler after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) for the fall of France to the Nazis in just six weeks in May and June 1940. Patriotic organizations and the popular press raised alarms and provided examples. In July 1940, Time magazine called fifth column talk a "national phenomenon".

In the late 1930s, several legislative proposals tried to address sedition itself and the underlying concern with the presence of large numbers of non-citizens, including citizens of countries with which the U.S. might soon be at war. An omnibus bill that included several measures died in 1939, but the Senate Judiciary Committee revived it in May 1940. It drew some of its language from statutes recently passed at the state level and combined anti-alien and anti-sedition sections with language crafted specifically to help the government in its attempts to deport Harry Bridges. With little debate, the House of Representatives approved it by a vote of 382 to 4, with 45 not voting, on June 22, 1940, the day the French signed an armistice with Germany. The Senate did not take a recorded vote.[4] It was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 28, 1940.[5] The Act is referred to by the name of its principal author, for Rep. Howard W. Smith of Virginia, a Democrat and a leader of the anti-labor bloc in Congress.

A few weeks later, the New York Times discussed the context in which the alien registration provisions were included and the Act passed:

The Alien Registration Act was merely one of many laws hastily passed in the first spasm of fear engendered by the success of fifth columns in less fortunate countries. Suddenly the European war seemed almost at our doors, and who could tell what secret agents were already at work in America? So, partly because some such bill would be adopted anyway, and partly because the step, normally distasteful, appeared inevitable, the Administration sponsored the legislation.

Also in June, the President transferred the Immigration and Naturalization Service from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice (DOJ), demonstrating that the federal government viewed its alien population as a security concern as war grew more likely.

In mid-August, officials of the DOJ held a two-day conference with state officials they called "Law Enforcement Problems of National Defense". Attorney General Jackson and FBI Director Hoover delineated the proper roles for federal and state authorities with respect to seditious activities. They successfully forestalled state regulation of aliens and found state officials receptive to their arguments that states needed to prevent vigilantism and protect aliens, while trusting federal authorities to use the Smith Act to deal with espionage and "fifth column" activities.

Provisions

Title I. Subversive activities. The Smith Act set federal criminal penalties that included fines or imprisonment for as long as twenty years and denied all employment by the federal government for five years following a conviction for anyone who:

...with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or...organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof.

The Smith Act's prohibition of proselytizing on behalf of revolution repeated language found in previous statutes. It went beyond earlier legislation in outlawing action to "organize any society, group, or assembly" that works toward that end and then extended that prohibition to "membership" or "affiliation"—a term it did not define—with such a group.

Title II. Deportation. Because the Supreme Court in Kessler v. Strecker (1939) held that the Immigration Act of 1918 allowed the deportation of an alien only if his membership in a group advocating the violent overthrown of the government had not ceased,[9] the Smith Act allowed for the deportation of any alien who "at the time of entering the United States, or ... at any time thereafter" was a member of or affiliated with such an organization.

The Smith Act expanded the grounds for deporting aliens to include weapons violations and abetting illegal immigration. It added heroin to the category of drug violations.

Title III. Alien registration. The Smith Act required aliens applying for visas to register and be fingerprinted. Every other alien resident of the United States:

who is fourteen years of age or older, ... and remains in the United States for thirty days or longer, [is] to apply for registration and to be fingerprinted before the expiration of such thirty days.

Registration would be under oath and include:

(1) the date and place of entry of the alien into the United States; (2) activities in which he has been and intends to be engaged; (3) the length of time he expects to remain in the United States; (4) the criminal record, if any, of such alien; and (5) such additional matters as may be prescribed by the Commissioner [of Immigration and Naturalization], with the approval of the Attorney General.

Guardians had to register minors, who had to register in person and be fingerprinted within 30 days of their fourteenth birthday. Post offices were designated as the location for registering and fingerprinting. Aliens were to notify the government if their residence changed and confirm their residence every three months. Penalties included fines up to $1000 and up to six months imprisonment.

Alien registration

Registrations began on August 27, 1940, and the newly created Alien Registration Division of the Immigration and Naturalization Service planned to register between three and three and a half million people at 45,000 post offices by December 26, after which those not registered became subject to the Smith Act's penalties. The Division held the view that registration benefited the alien, who "is now safeguarded from bigoted persecution." The alien was to bring a completed form to a post office and be fingerprinted. Registration cards would be delivered by mail and would serve "in the nature of protection of the alien later runs afoul of the police." The details required for registration had been expanded since the passage of the Act to include race, employer's name and address, relatives in the U.S., organization memberships, application for citizenship, and military service record for the U.S. or any other country. Solicitor General Biddle had responsibility for the Division, which was headed by Earl G. Harrison during its first six months. In a radio address meant to reassure aliens, Biddle said: "It was not the intention of Congress to start a witch hunt or a program of persecution." Calling it a "patriotic duty", he said:

Many people still feel that there is a stigma attached to being fingerprinted. I have been fingerprinted, as have millions of others who served in the armed forces of the United States. All Federal civil service employees are fingerprinted. Even postal savings depositors are fingerprinted. I assure you that there is no stigma attached to being fingerprinted in this day and age.

Government efforts to encourage registration asked citizens to participate:

The Immigration and Naturalization Service asks for the cooperation of all citizens in carrying out the Alien Registration program in a friendly manner so that our large foreign population is not antagonized. Citizens may be of great help to their non-citizen neighbors or relatives by explaining to those who do not speak English well what the registration is, where aliens go to register, and what information they must give.

The number registered passed 4.7 million by January 1941.

After the U.S. declared war in 1941, federal authorities used data gathered from alien registrations to identify citizens of enemy nations and take 2,971 them into custody by the end of the year.[15] A different set of requirements was imposed during the war on enemy aliens, citizens of nations with which the U.S. was at war[16] by presidential proclamations of January 14, 1942,[17] without reference to the Smith Act.

In December 1950, following an Immigration and Naturalization Service hearing, Claudia Jones, a citizen of Trinidad, was ordered deported from the U.S. for violating the McCarran Act as an alien (non-U.S. citizen) who had joined the Communist Party (CPUSA). The evidence of her party membership included information she provided when completing her Alien Registration form on December 24, 1940.

Legal proceedings

Harry Bridges

The Smith Act was written so that federal authorities could deport radical labor organizer Harry Bridges, an immigrant from Australia.[4] Deportation hearings against Bridges in 1939 found he did not qualify for deportation because he was not currently—as the Alien Act of 1918 required—a member of or affiliated with an organization that advocated the overthrow of the government.[19] The Smith Act allowed deportation of an alien who was a member of affiliated "at any time" since arriving in the U.S. A second round of deportation hearings ended after ten weeks in June 1941.[20] In September, the special examiner who led the hearings recommended deportation, but the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) reversed that order after finding the government's two key witnesses unreliable.[21] In May 1942, though the Roosevelt administration was now putting its anti-Communist activities on hold in the interest of furthering the Soviet-American alliance, Attorney General Biddle overruled the BIA and ordered Bridges deported.[22] Bridges appealed and lost in District Court[23] and the Court of Appeals,[24] but the Supreme Court held 5–3 on June 18, 1945, in the case of Bridges v. Wixon that the government had not proven Bridges was "affiliated" with the CPUSA,[25] a word it interpreted to require more than "sympathy" or "mere cooperation".

Minneapolis 1941

On June 27, 1941, as part of a campaign to end labor militancy in the defense industry, FBI agents raided the Minneapolis and St. Paul offices of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP),[27] a Trotskyist splinter party that controlled Local 544 of the Teamsters union though it had fewer than two thousand members in 30 U.S. cities. The union had grown steadily in the late 1930s, had organized federal relief workers and led a strike against the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency.[28] In mid-July, a federal grand jury indicted 29 people, either members of the SWP or Local 544 of the Teamsters union, or both.

SWP defendants included James P. Cannon, Carl Skoglund, Farrell Dobbs, Grace Carlson, Harry DeBoer, Max Geldman, Albert Goldman, and twelve other party leaders. Goldman acted as the defendants' lawyer during the trial. The SWP had been influential in Minneapolis since the Teamsters Strike of 1934. It advocated strikes and the continuation of labor union militancy during World War II under its Proletarian Military Policy. An SWP member edited the Northwest Organizer, the weekly newspaper of the Minneapolis Teamsters, and the local remained militant even as the national union grew more conservative. The CPUSA supported the trial and conviction of Trotskyists under the Smith Act. The defendants were accused of having plotted to overthrow the U.S. government in violation of the unused Sedition Act of 1861 as well as the newly passed Smith Act.

When critics argued that the government should adhere to the doctrine enunciated by Justice Holmes that free speech could only be prosecuted if it presented "a clear and present danger," Attorney General Biddle replied that Congress had considered both that standard and the international situation when writing the Smith Act's proscriptions. At trial the judge took Biddle's view and refused to instruct the jury in the "clear and present danger" standard as the defendants' attorneys requested.[30] The trial began in Federal District Court in Minneapolis on October 27, 1941. The prosecution presented evidence that the accused had amassed a small arsenal of pistols and rifles and conducted target practices and drills. Some had met with Trotsky in Mexico, and many witnesses testified to their revolutionary rhetoric.

The judge ordered that five of the defendants be acquitted on both counts for lack of evidence. After deliberating for 56 hours, the jury found the other 23 defendants (one had committed suicide during the trial) not guilty of violating the 1861 statute by conspiring to overthrow the government by force. The jury found 18 of the defendants guilty of violating the Smith Act either by distributing written material designed to cause insubordination in the armed forces or by advocating the overthrow of the government by force. The jury recommended leniency. On December 8, 1941, 12 defendants received 16-month sentences and the remaining 11 received 12-months.[33] Time magazine minimized the danger from the SWP, calling it "a nestful of mice." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and critics on the left worried that the case created a dangerous precedent.

On appeal, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of the 18. The judges found it unnecessary to consider the "clear and present danger" standard in "situations where the legislative body had outlawed certain utterances."[35] The Supreme Court declined to review the case. Those convicted began to serve their sentences on December 31, 1943. The last of them were released in February 1945. Biddle, in his memoirs published in 1962, regretted having authorized the prosecution.

Nazi sympathizers and racists

Early in 1942, President Roosevelt, supported by the rest of his Cabinet, urged Attorney General Biddle to prosecute fascist sympathizers and anti-Semites.[37] Biddle thought the Smith Act inadequate, but Congress refused to renew the Sedition Act of 1918 as he asked.

Crusader White Shirts

In March 1942, the government charged George W. Christians, founder of the Crusader White Shirts, with violating the Smith Act by attempting to spread dissent in the armed forces. Life had published a photo of Christians in 1939 under the heading "Some of the Voices of Hate".[40] Christians said he promoted a "human effort monetary system" and supported "a paper and ink revolution for economic liberty". After a four-day trial, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison on June 8.

Washington 1944

Thirty prominent individuals were indicted in Washington, D.C., in July 1942, accused of violations of the Smith Act. After delays while the government amended the charges and struggled to construct its case, the trial, expanded to 33 defendants, began on April 17, 1944. The defendants were a heterogeneous group that held either isolationist or pro-fascist views. In the case of U.S. v. McWilliams, the prosecutor, O. John Rogge, hoped to prove they were Nazi propaganda agents by demonstrating the similarity between their statements and enemy propaganda. The weakness of the government's case, combined with the trial's slow progress in the face of disruption by the defendants, led the press to lose interest. A mistrial was declared on November 29, 1944, following the death of the trial judge, Edward C. Eicher. Defendant Lawrence Dennis mocked the affair by subtitling his account of the trial The Great Sedition Trial of 1944.

Only Rogge, a committed liberal, wanted to retry the case to "stop the spread of racial and religious intolerance."[44] Supreme Court decisions since the 1942 indictments made convictions appear ever more unlikely.[47] Roger Baldwin of the ACLU campaigned against renewing the prosecutions, securing the endorsement of many of the defendants' ideological opponents, including the American Jewish Committee, while only the CPUSA held out. Tom Clark, Biddle's replacement as Attorney General in the Truman administration, vacillated about the case. In October 1946, he fired Rogge in a public dispute about publicizing DOJ information about right-wing activities. With the end of World War II, attention turned from the defeated ideologies of the Axis powers to the threat of Communism, and in December 1946 the government had the charges dismissed.[48]

Communist Party trials

Main article: Smith Act trials of communist party leaders

After a ten-month trial at the Foley Square Courthouse in Manhattan, eleven leaders of the Communist Party were convicted under the Smith Act in 1949.[49] Ten defendants received sentences of five years and $10,000 fines. An eleventh defendant, Robert G. Thompson, a distinguished hero of the Second World War, was sentenced to three years in consideration of his military record. The five defense attorneys were cited for contempt of court and given prison sentences. Those convicted appealed the verdicts, and the Supreme Court upheld their convictions in 1951 in Dennis v. United States in a 6-2 decision.

Following that decision, the DOJ prosecuted dozens of cases. In total, by May 1956, another 131 communists were indicted, of whom 98 were convicted, nine acquitted, while juries brought no verdict in the other cases. Other party leaders indicted included Claudia Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the ACLU.

Appeals from other trials reached the Supreme Court with varying results. On June 17, 1957, Yates v. United States held unconstitutional the convictions of numerous party leaders in a ruling that distinguished between advocacy of an idea for incitement and the teaching of an idea as a concept. The same day, the Court ruled 6-1 in Watkins v. United States that defendants could use the First Amendment as a defense against "abuses of the legislative process." On June 5, 1961, the Supreme Court upheld by 5-4 the conviction of Junius Scales under the "membership clause" of the Smith Act. Scales began serving a six-year sentence on October 2, 1961. He was released after serving fifteen months when President John F. Kennedy commuted his sentence in 1962.

 

The Alien Registration Act, 1940


AN ACT

To prohibit certain subversive activities; to amend certain provisions of law with respect to the admission and deportation of aliens; to require the fingerprinting and registration of aliens; and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,



TITLE I

Section 1. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person, with intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States —
(1) to advise, counsel, urge, or in any manner cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States; or
(2) to distribute any written or printed matter which advises, counsels, or urges insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States.
(b) For the purposes of this section, the term ''military or naval forces of the United States'' includes the Army of the United States, as defined in section 1 of the National Defense Act of June 3, 1916, as amended (48 Stat. 153; U.S.C., title 10, sec. 2), the Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Naval Reserve, and Marine Corps Reserve of the United States; and, when any merchant vessel is commissioned in the Navy or is in the service of the Army or the Navy, includes the master, officers, and crew of such vessel.

Section 2. ((a) It shall be unlawful for any person —
(1) to knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government;
(2) with the intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any government in the United States, to print, publish, edit, issue, circulate, sell, distribute, or publicly display any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence.
(3) to organize or help to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any government in the United States by force or violence; or to be or become a member of, or affiliate with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof. (b) For the purposes of this section, the term ''government in the United States'' means the Government of the United States, the government of any State, Territory, or possession of the United States, the government of the District of Columbia, or the government of any political subdivision of any of them.

Section 3. It shall be unlawful for any person to attempt to commit, or to conspire to commit, any of the acts prohibited by the provisions of this title.

Section 4. Any written or printed matter of the character described in section 1 or section 2 of this Act, which is intended for use in violation of this Act, may be taken from any house or other place in which it may be found, or from any person in whose possession it may be, under a search warrant issued pursuant to the provisions of title XI of the Act entitled ''An Act to punish acts of interference with the foreign relations, the neutrality and the foreign commerce of the United States, to punish espionage, and better to enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and for other purposes'', approved June 15, 1917 (40 Stat. 228; U.S.C., title 18, ch. 18).

Section 5. (a) Any person who violates any of the provisions of this title shall, upon conviction thereof, be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned for not more than ten years, or both.
(b) No person convicted of violating any of the provisions of this title shall, during the five years next following his conviction, be eligible for employment by the United States, or by any department or agency thereof (including any corporation the Stock of which is wholly owned by the United States).



TITLE II

Section 20. Section 19 of the Immigration Act of February 5, 1917 (39 Stat. 889; U.S.C., title 8, sec. 155), as amended, is amended by inserting, after ''Sec. 19.'', the letter
''(a)'', and by adding at the end of such section the following new subsections:
''(b) Any alien of any of the classes specified in this subsection, in addition to aliens who are deportable under other provisions of law, shall, upon warrant of the Attorney General, be taken into custody and deported:
''(1) Any alien who, at any time within five years after entry, shall have, knowingly and for gain, encouraged, induced, assisted, abetted, or aided any other alien to enter or to try to enter the United States in violation of law.
''(2) Any alien who, at any time after entry, shall have on more than one occasion, knowingly and for gain, encouraged, induced, assisted, abetted, or aided any other alien or aliens to enter or to try to enter the United States in violation of law.
''(3) Any alien who, at any time after entry, shall have been convicted of possessing or carrying in violation of any law any weapon which shoots or is designed to shoot automatically or semi-automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger, or a weapon commonly called a sawed-off shotgun.
''(4) Any alien who, at any time within five years after entry, shall have been convicted of violating the provisions of title I of the Alien Registration Act, 1940.
''(5) Any alien who, at any time after entry, shall have been convicted more than once of violating the provisions of title I of the Alien Registration Act, 1940. ''No alien who is deportable under the provisions of paragraph (3), (4), or (5) of this subsection shall be deported until the termination of his imprisonment or the entry of an order releasing him on probation or parole.
''(c) In the same of any alien (other than one to whom subsection (d) is applicable) who is deportable under any law of the United States and who has proved good moral character for the preceding five years, the Attorney General may (1) permit such alien to depart the United States to any country of his choice at his own expense, in lieu of deportation, or (2) suspend deportation of such alien if not racially inadmissible or ineligible to naturalization in the United States if he finds that such deportation would result in serious economic detriment to a citizen or legally resident alien who is the spouse, parent, or minor child of such deportable alien. If the deportation of any alien is suspended under the provisions of this subsection for more than six months, all of the facts and pertinent provisions of law in the case shall be reported to the Congress within ten days after the beginning of its next regular session, with the reasons for such suspension. The Clerk of the House shall have such report printed as a public document. If during that session the two Houses pass a concurrent resolution stating in substance that the Congress does not favor the suspension of such deportation, the Attorney General shall thereupon deport such alien in the manner provided by law. If during the session the two Houses do not pass such a resolution, the Attorney General shall cancel deportation proceedings upon the termination of such session, except that such proceedings shall not be canceled in the case of any alien who was not legally admitted for permanent residence at the time of his last entry into the United States, unless such alien pays to the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization a fee of $18 (which fee shall be deposited in the Treasury of the United States as miscellaneous receipts). Upon the cancelation of such proceedings in any case in which such fee has been paid, the Commissioner shall record the alien's admission for permanent residence as of the date of his last entry into the United States and the Secretary of State shall, if the alien was a quota immigrant at the time of entry and was not charged to the appropriate quota, reduce by one the immigration quota of the country of the alien's nationality as defined in section 12 of the Act of May 26, 1924 (U. S. C., title 8, sec. 212), for the fiscal year then current or next following. ''(d) The provisions of subsection (c) shall not be applicable in the case of any alien who is deportable under (1) the Act of October 16, 1918 (40 Stat. 1008; U. S. C., title 8, sec. 137), entitled 'An Act to exclude and expel from the United States aliens who are members of the anarchist and similar classes', as amended; (2) the Act of May 26, 1922, entitled 'An Act to amend the Act entitled ''An Act to prohibit the importation and use of opium for other than medicinal purposes'', approved February 9, 1909, as amended' (42 Stat. 596; U. S. C., title 21, sec. 175); (3) the Act of February 18, 1931, entitled 'An Act to provide for the deportation of aliens convicted and sentenced for violation of any law regulating traffic in narcotics', as amended (46 Stat. 1171; U. S. C., title 8, sec. 156a); (4) any of the provisions of so much of subsection (a) of this section as relates to criminals, prostitutes, procurers, or other immoral persons, the mentally and physically deficient, anarchists, and similar classes; or (5) subsection (b) of this section.''

Within the territory and waters of the Canal Zone the Governor of the Panama Canal, with the approval of the President, shall exercise all the powers conferred by this section on the Secretary of the Treasury.

Section 21. The Act entitled ''An Act to provide for the deportation of aliens convicted and sentenced for violation of any law regulating traffic in narcotics'', approved February 18, 1931, is amended —
(1) By striking out the words ''and sentenced'';
(2) By inserting after the words ''any statute of the United States'' the following: ''or of any State, Territory, possession, or of the District of Columbia,''; and
(3) By inserting after the word ''heroin'' a comma and the word ''marihuana''.

Section 22. No alien shall be deportable by reason of the amendments made by section 20 or 21 on account of any act committed prior to the date of enactment of this Act.

Section 23. a) The first paragraph of section 1 of the Act entitled ''An Act to exclude and expel from the United States aliens who are members of the anarchistic and similar classes'', approved October 16, 1918, as amended, is amended to read as follows:
''That any alien who, at any time, shall be or shall have been a member of any one of the following classes shall be excluded from admission into the United States:''.
(b) Section 2 of such Act of October 16, 1918, as amended, is amended to read as follows:

Section 2. Any alien who was at the time of entering the United States, or has been at any time thereafter, a member of any one of the classes of aliens enumerated in section 1 of this Act, shall, upon the warrant of the Attorney General, be taken into custody and deported in the manner provided in the Immigration Act of February 5, 1917. The provisions of this section shall be applicable to the classes of aliens mentioned in this Act, irrespective of the time of their entry into the United States.''



TITLE III

Section 30. No visa shall hereafter be issued to any alien seeking to enter the United States unless said alien has been registered and fingerprinted in duplicate. One copy of the registration and fingerprint record shall be retained by the consul. The second copy shall be attached to the alien's visa and shall be taken up by the examining immigrant inspector at the port of arrival of the alien in the United States and forwarded to the Department of Justice, at Washington, District of Columbia. Any alien seeking to enter the United States who does not present a visa (except in emergency cases defined by the Secretary of State), a reentry permit, or a border-crossing identification card shall be excluded from admission to the United States.

Section 31. (a) It shall be the duty of every alien now or hereafter in the United States, who (1) is fourteen years of age or older, (2) has not been registered and fingerprinted under section 30, and (3) remains in the United States for thirty days or longer, to apply for registration and to be fingerprinted before the expiration of such thirty days. (b) It shall be the duty of every parent or legal guardian of any alien now or hereafter in the United States, who (1) is less than fourteen years of age, (2) has not been registered under section 30, and (3) remains in the United States for thirty days or longer, to apply for the registration of such alien before the expiration of such thirty days. Whenever any alien attains his fourteenth birthday in the United States he shall, within thirty days thereafter, apply in person for registration and to be fingerprinted.

Section 32. Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 30 and 31 —
(a) The application for the registration and fingerprinting, or for the registration, of any alien who is in the United States on the effective date of such sections may be made at any time within four months after such date.
(b) No foreign government official, or member of his family, shall be required to be registered or fingerprinted under this title.
(c) The Commissioner is authorized to prescribe, with the approval of the Attorney General, special regulations for the registration and fingerprinting of (1) alien seamen, (2) holders of border-crossing identification cards, (3) aliens confined in institutions within the United States, (4) aliens under order or deportation, and (5) aliens of any other class not lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence.

Section 33. (a) All applications for registration and fingerprinting under section 31 shall be made at post offices or such other places as may be designated by the Commissioner.
(b) It shall be the duty of every postmaster, with such assistance as shall be provided by the Commissioner, to register and fingerprint any applicant for registration and fingerprinting under such section, and for such purposes to designate appropriate space in the local post office for such registration and fingerprinting. Every postmaster shall forward promptly to the Department of Justice, at Washington, District of Columbia, the registration and fingerprint record of every alien registered and fingerprinted by him. The Commissioner may designate such other places for registration and fingerprinting as may be necessary for carrying out the provisions of this Act, and provide for registration and fingerprinting of aliens at such places by officers or employees of the Immigration and Naturalization Service designated by the Commissioner. The duties imposed upon any postmaster under this Act shall also be performed by any employees at the post office of such postmaster who are designated by the postmaster for such purpose.

Section 34. (a) The Commissioner is authorized and directed to prepare forms for the registration and fingerprinting of aliens under this title. Such forms shall contain inquiries with respect to (1) the date and place of entry of the alien into the United States; (2) activities in which he has been and intends to be engaged; (3) the length of time he expects to remain in the United States; (4) the criminal record, if any, of such alien; and (5) such additional matters as may be prescribed by the Commissioner, with the approval of the Attorney General.
(b) All registration and fingerprint records made under the provisions of this title shall be secret and confidential, and shall be made available only to such persons or agencies as may be designated by the Commissioner, with the approval of the Attorney General.
(c) Every person required to apply for the registration of himself or another under this title shall submit under oath the information required for such registration. Any person authorized to register aliens under this title shall be authorized to administer oaths for such purpose.

Section 35. Any alien required to be registered under this title who is a resident of the United States shall notify the Commissioner in writing of each change of residence and new address within five days from the date of such change. Any other alien required to be registered under this title shall notify the Commissioner in writing of his address at the expiration of each three months' period of residence in the United States. In the case of an alien for whom a parent or legal guardian is required to apply for registration, the notices required by this section shall be given by such parent or legal guardian.

Section 36. (a) Any alien required to apply for registration and to be fingerprinted who willfully fails to refuses to make such application or to be fingerprinted, and any parent or legal guardian required to apply for the registration of any alien who willfully fails or refuses to file application for the registration of such alien shall, upon conviction thereof be fined not to exceed $1,000 or be imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
(b) Any alien, or any parent or legal guardian of any alien, who fails to give written notice to the Commissioner of change of address as required by section 35 of this Act shall, upon conviction thereof, be fined not to exceed $100, or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.
(c) Any alien or any parent or legal guardian of any alien, who files an application for registration containing statements known by him to be false, or who procures or attempts to procure registration of himself or another person through fraud, shall, upon conviction thereof, be fined not to exceed $1,000, or be imprisoned not more than six months, or both; and any alien so convicted within five years after entry into the United States shall, upon the warrant of the Attorney General, be taken into custody and be deported in the manner provided in sections 19 and 20 of the Immigration Act of February 5, 1917, as amended.

Section 37. (a) The Commissioner, with the approval of the Attorney General, is authorized and empowered to make the prescribe, and from time to time to change and amend, such rules and regulations not in conflict with this Act as he may deem necessary and proper in aid of the administration and enforcement of this title (including provisions for the identification of aliens registered under this title); except that all such rules and regulations, insofar as they relate to the performance of functions by consular officers or officers or employees in the Postal Service, shall be prescribed by the Secretary of State and the Postmaster General, respectively, upon recommendation of the Attorney General. The powers conferred upon the Attorney General by this Act and all other powers of the Attorney General relating to the administration of the Immigration and Naturalization Service may be exercised by the Attorney General through such officers of the Department of Justice, including officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, attorneys, special attorneys, and special assistants to the Attorney General, as he may designate specifically for such purposes.
(b) The Commissioner is authorized to make such expenditures, to employ such additional temporary and permanent employees, and to rent such quarters outside the District of Columbia as may be necessary for carrying out the provisions of this title.

Section 38. (a) For the purposes of this title —
(1) the term ''United States'', when used in a geographical sense, means the States, the Territories of Alaska and Hawaii, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands;
(2) the term ''Commissioner'' means the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization.
(b) The provisions of this title shall take effect upon the date of enactment of this Act; except that sections 30 and 31 shall take effect sixty days after the date of its enactment.

Section 39. The President is authorized to provide, by Executive order, for the registration and fingerprinting, in a manner as nearly similar to that provided in this title as he deems practicable, of aliens in the Panama Canal Zone.



TITLE IV

Section 40. If any provision of this Act, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance, is held invalid, the remainder of the Act, and the application of such provision to other persons or circumstances, shall not be affected thereby.

Section 41. This Act may be cited as the ''Alien Registration Act, 1940''.

Approved, June 28, 1940.

 

Maintenance of National Security and the First Amendment

Preservation of the security of the Nation from its enemies, foreign and domestic, is the obligation of government and one of the foremost reasons for government to exist. Pursuit of this goal may lead government officials at times to trespass in areas protected by the guarantees of speech and press and may require the balancing away of rights which might be preserved inviolate at other times. The drawing of the line is committed, not exclusively but finally, to the Supreme Court. In this section, we consider a number of areas in which the necessity to draw lines has arisen.

Punishment of Advocacy .--Criminal punishment for the advocacy of illegal or of merely unpopular goals and of ideas did not originate in the United States in the post-World War II concern with Communism. Enactment of and prosecutions under the Sedition Act of 1798 1 and prosecutions under the federal espionage laws 2 and state sedition and criminal syndicalism laws 3 in the 1920's and early 1930's have been alluded to earlier. 4 But it was in the 1950's and the 1960's that the Supreme Court confronted First Amendment concepts fully in determining the degree to which government could proceed against persons and organizations which it believed were plotting and conspiring both to advocate the overthrow of government and to accomplish that goal.



The Smith Act of 1940 5 made it a criminal offense for anyone to knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises, or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association. No case involving pros ecution under this law was reviewed by the Supreme Court until in Dennis v. United States 6 it considered the convictions of eleven Communist Party leaders on charges of conspiracy to violate the advocacy and organizing sections of the statute. Chief Justice Vinson's plurality opinion for the Court applied a revised clear and present danger test 7 and concluded that the evil sought to be prevented was serious enough to justify suppression of speech. ''If, then, this interest may be protected, the literal problem which is presented is what has been meant by the use of the phrase 'clear and present danger' of the utterances bringing about the evil within the power of Congress to punish. Obviously, the words cannot mean that before the Government may act, it must wait until the putsch is about to be executed, the plans have been laid and the signal is awaited. If Government is aware that a group aiming at its overthrow is attempting to indoctrinate its members and to commit them to a course whereby they will strike when the leaders feel the circumstances permit, action by the Government is required.'' 8 ''The mere fact that from the period 1945 to 1948 petitioners' activities did not result in an attempt to overthrow the Government by force and violence is of course no answer to the fact that there was a group that was ready to make the attempt. The formation by petitioners of such a highly organized conspiracy, with rigidly disciplined members subject to call when the leaders, these petitioners, felt that the time had come for action, coupled with the inflammable nature of world conditions, similar uprisings in other countries, and the touch-and-go nature of our relations with countries with whom petitioners were in the very least ideologically attuned, convince us that their convictions were justified on this score.'' 9



Justice Frankfurter in concurrence developed a balancing test, which, however, he deferred to the congressional judgment in applying, concluding that ''there is ample justification for a legislative judgment that the conspiracy now before us is a substantial threat to national order and security.'' 10 Justice Jackson's concurrence was based on his reading of the case as involving ''a conviction of conspiracy, after a trial for conspiracy, on an indictment charging conspiracy, brought under a statute outlawing conspiracy.'' Here the Government was dealing with ''permanently organized, well-financed, semi-secret, and highly disciplined organizations'' plotting to overthrow the Government; under the First Amendment ''it is not forbidden to put down force and violence, it is not forbidden to punish its teaching or advocacy, and the end being punishable, there is no doubt of the power to punish conspiracy for the purpose.'' 11 Justices Black and Douglas dissented separately, the former viewing the Smith Act as an invalid prior restraint and calling for reversal of the convictions for lack of a clear and present danger, the latter applying the Holmes-Brandeis formula of clear and present danger to conclude that ''[t]o believe that petitioners and their following are placed in such critical positions as to endanger the Nation is to believe the incredible.'' 12



In Yates v. United States, 13 the convictions of several second-string Communist Party leaders were set aside, a number ordered acquitted, and others remanded for retrial. The decision was based upon construction of the statute and appraisal of the evidence rather than on First Amendment claims, although each prong of the ruling seems to have been informed with First Amendment considerations. Thus, Justice Harlan for the Court wrote that the trial judge had given faulty instructions to the jury in advising that all advocacy and teaching of forcible overthrow was punishable, whether it was language of incitement or not, so long as it was done with an intent to accomplish that purpose. But the statute, the Justice continued, prohibited ''advocacy of action,'' not merely ''advocacy in the realm of ideas.'' ''The essential distinction is that those to whom the advocacy is addressed must be urged to do something, now or in the future, rather than merely to believe in something.'' 14 Second, the Court found the evidence insufficient to establish that the Communist Party had engaged in the required advocacy of action, requiring the Government to prove such advocacy in each instance rather than presenting evidence generally about the Party. Additionally, the Court found the evidence insufficient to link five of the defendants to advocacy of action, but sufficient with regard to the other nine. 15



Compelled Registration of Communist Party .--The Internal Security Act of 1950 provided for a comprehensive regulatory scheme by which ''Communist-action organizations'' and ''Com munist-front organizations'' could be curbed. 16 Organizations found to fall within one or the other of these designations were required to register and to provide for public inspection membership lists, accountings of all money received and expended, and listings of all printing presses and duplicating machines; members of organizations which failed to register were required to register and members were subject to comprehensive restrictions and criminal sanctions. After a lengthy series of proceedings, a challenge to the registration provisions reached the Supreme Court, which sustained the constitutionality of the section under the First Amendment, only Justice Black dissenting on this ground. 17 Employing the balancing test, Justice Frankfurter for himself and four other Justices concluded that the threat to national security posed by the Communist conspiracy outweighed considerations of individual liberty, the impact of the registration provision in this area in any event being limited to whatever ''public opprobrium and obloquy'' might attach. 18 Three Justices based their conclusion on the premise that the Communist Party was an anti-democratic, secret organization, subservient to a foreign power, utilizing speech-plus in attempting to achieve its ends and therefore subject to extensive governmental regulation. 19



Punishment for Membership in an Organization Which Engages in Proscribed Advocacy .--It was noted above that the Smith Act also contained a provision making it a crime to organize or become a member of an organization which teaches, advocates, or encourages the overthrow of government by force or violence. 20 The Government used this authority to proceed against Communist Party members. In Scales v. United States, 21 the Court affirmed a conviction under this section and held it constitutional against First Amendment attack. Advocacy such as the Communist Party engaged in, Justice Harlan wrote for the Court, was unprotected under Dennis, and he could see no reason why membership which constituted a purposeful form of complicity in a group engaging in such advocacy should be a protected form of association. Of course, ''f there were a similar blanket prohibition of association with a group having both legal and illegal aims, there would indeed be a real danger that legitimate political expression or association would be impaired, but . . . [t]he clause does not make criminal all association with an organization which has been shown to engage in illegal advocacy.'' Only an ''active'' member of the Party--one who with knowledge of the proscribed advocacy intends to accomplish the aims of the organization--was to be punished, the Court said, not a ''nominal, passive, inactive or purely technical'' member. 22



[Footnote 22] Id. 228-30. In Noto v. United States, 367 U.S. 290 (1961), the Court reversed a conviction under the membership clause because the evidence was insufficient to prove that the Party had engaged in unlawful advocacy. ''[T]he mere abstract teaching of Communist theory, including the teaching of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action. There must be some substantial direct or circumstantial evidence of a call to violence now or in the future which is both sufficiently strong and sufficiently pervasive to lend color to the otherwise ambiguous theoretical material regarding Communist Party teaching, and to justify the inference that such a call to violence may fairly be imputed to the Party as a whole, and not merely to some narrow segment of it.'' Id. at 297-98.

Disabilities Attaching to Membership in Proscribed Organizations .--The consequences of being or becoming a member of a proscribed organization can be severe. Aliens are subject to deportation for such membership. 23 Congress made it unlawful for any member of an organization required to register as a ''Communist-action'' or a ''Communist-front'' organization to apply for a passport or to use a passport. 24 A now-repealed statute required as a condition of access to NLRB processes by any union that each of its officers must file affidavits that he was not a member of the Communist Party or affiliated with it. 25 The Court has sustained state bar associations in their efforts to probe into applicants' membership in the Communist Party in order to determine whether there was knowing membership on the part of one sharing a specific intent to further the illegal goals of the organization. 26 A section of the Communist Control Act of 1954 was designed to keep the Communist Party off the ballot in all elections. 27 The most recent interpretation of this type of disability is United States v. Robel, 28 in which the Court held unconstitutional under the First Amendment a section of the Internal Security Act which made it unlawful for any member of an organization compelled to register as a ''Communist-action'' or ''Communist-front'' organization to work thereafter in any defense facility. For the Court, Chief Justice Warren wrote that a statute which so infringed upon freedom of association must be much more narrowly drawn to take precise account of the evils at which it permissibly could be aimed. One could be disqualified from holding sensitive positions on the basis of active, knowing membership with a specific intent to further the unlawful goals of an organization, but that membership which was passive or inactive, or by a person unaware of the organization's unlawful aims, or by one who disagreed with those aims, could not be grounds for disqualification, certainly not for a non-sensitive position. 29



A somewhat different matter is disqualifying a person for public benefits of some sort because of membership in a proscribed organization or because of some other basis ascribable to doubts about his loyalty. The First Amendment was raised only in dissent when in Flemming v. Nestor 30 the Court sustained a statute which required the termination of Social Security old age benefits to an alien who was deported on grounds of membership in the Communist Party. Proceeding on the basis that no one was ''entitled'' to Social Security benefits, Justice Harlan for the Court concluded that a rational justification for the law might be the deportee's inability to aid the domestic economy by spending the benefits locally, although a passage in the opinion could be read to suggest that termination was permissible because alien Communists are undeserving of benefits. 31 Of considerable significance in First Amendment jurisprudence is Speiser v. Randall, 32 in which the Court struck down a state scheme for denying veterans' property tax exemptions to ''disloyal'' persons. The system, as interpreted by the state courts, denied the exemption only to persons who engaged in speech which could be criminally punished consistent with the First Amendment, but the Court found the vice of the provision to be that after each claimant had executed an oath disclaiming his engagement in unlawful speech, the tax assessor could disbelieve the oath taker and deny the exemption, thus placing on the claimant the burden of proof of showing that he was loyal. ''The vice of the present procedure is that, where particular speech falls close to the line separating the lawful and the unlawful, the possibility of mistaken fact-finding--inherent in all litigation--will create the danger that the legitimate utterance will be penalized. The man who knows that he must bring forth proof and persuade another of the lawfulness of his conduct necessarily must steer far wider of the unlawful zone than if the State must bear these burdens . . . . In practical operation, therefore, this procedural device must necessarily produce a result which the State could not command directly. It can only result in a deterrence of speech which the Constitution makes free.'' 33



Employment Restrictions and Loyalty Oaths .--An area in which significant First Amendment issues are often raised is the establishment of loyalty-security standards for government employees. Such programs generally take one of two forms or may com bine the two. First, government may establish a system investigating employees or prospective employees under standards relating to presumed loyalty. Second, government may require its employees or prospective employees to subscribe to a loyalty oath disclaiming belief in or advocacy of, or membership in an organization which stands for or advocates, unlawful or disloyal action. The Federal Government's security investigation program has been tested numerous times and First Amendment issues raised, but the Supreme Court has never squarely confronted the substantive constitutional issues, and it has not dealt with the loyalty oath features of the federal program. 34 The Court has, however, had a long running encounter with state loyalty oath programs. 35



First encountered 36 was a loyalty oath for candidates for public office rather than one for public employees. Accepting the state court construction that the law required each candidate to ''make oath that he is not a person who is engaged 'in one way or another in the attempt to overthrow the government by force or violence,' and that he is not knowingly a member of an organization engaged in such an attempt,'' the Court unanimously sustained the provision in a one- paragraph per curiam opinion. 37 Less than two months later, the Court did uphold a requirement that employees take an oath that they had not within a prescribed period advised, advocated, or taught the overthrow of government by unlawful means, nor been a member of an organization with similar objectives; every employee was also required to swear that he was not and had not been a member of the Communist Party. 38 For the Court, Justice Clark perceived no problem with the inquiry into Communist Party membership but cautioned that no issue had been raised whether an employee who was or had been a member could be discharged merely for that reason. 39 With regard to the oath, the Court did not discuss First Amendment considerations but stressed that it believed the appropriate authorities would not construe the oath adversely against persons who were innocent of an organization's purpose during their affiliation, or persons who had severed their associations upon knowledge of an organization's purposes, or persons who had been members of an organization at a time when it was not unlawfully engaged. 40 Otherwise, the oath requirement was valid as ''a reasonable regulation to protect the municipal service by establishing an employment qualification of loyalty'' and as being ''reasonably designed to protect the integrity and competency of the service.'' 41



In the following Term, the Court sustained a state statute disqualifying for government employment persons who advocated the overthrow of government by force or violence or persons who were members of organizations which so advocated; the statute had been supplemented by a provision applicable to teachers calling for the drawing up of a list of organizations which advocated violent overthrow and making membership in any listed organization prima facie evidence of disqualification. 42 Justice Minton observed that everyone had a right to assemble, speak, think, and believe as he pleased, but had no right to work for the State in its public school system except upon compliance with the State's reasonable terms. ''If they do not choose to work on such terms, they are at liberty to retain their beliefs and associations and go elsewhere. Has the State thus deprived them of any right to free speech or assembly? We think not.'' 43 A State could deny employment based on a person's advocacy of overthrow of the government by force or violence or based on unexplained membership in an organization so advocating with knowledge of the advocacy. 44 With regard to the required list, the Justice observed that the state courts had interpreted the law to provide that a person could rebut the presumption attached to his mere membership. 45



Invalidated the same year was an oath requirement, addressed to membership in the Communist Party and other proscribed organizations, which the state courts had interpreted to disqualify from employment ''solely on the basis of organizational membership.'' Stressing that membership might be innocent, that one might be unaware of an organization's aims, or that he might have severed a relationship upon learning of its aims, the Court struck the law down; one must be or have been a member with knowledge of illegal aims. 46 But subsequent cases firmly reiterated the power of governmental agencies to inquire into the associational relationships of their employees for purposes of determining fitness and upheld dismissals for refusal to answer relevant questions. 47 In Shelton v. Tucker, 48 however, a five-to-four majority held that, while a State could inquire into the fitness and competence of its teachers, a requirement that every teacher annually list every organization to which he belonged or had belonged in the previous five years was invalid because it was too broad, bore no rational relationship to the State's interests, and had a considerable potential for abuse.



Vagueness was then employed by the Court when loyalty oaths aimed at ''subversives'' next came before it. Cramp v. Board of Public Instruction 49 unanimously held too vague an oath which required one to swear, inter alia, that ''I have not and will not lend my aid, support, advice, counsel or influence to the Communist Party.'' Similarly, in Baggett v. Bullitt, 50 two oaths, one requiring teachers to swear that they ''will by precept and example promote respect for the flag and the institutions of the United States of America and the State of Washington, reverence for law and order and undivided allegiance to the government,'' and the other requiring all state employees to swear, inter alia, that they would not ''aid in the commission of any act intended to overthrow, destroy, or alter or assist in the overthrow, destruction, or alteration'' of government. Although couched in vagueness terms, the Court's opinion stressed that the vagueness was compounded by its effect on First Amendment rights and seemed to emphasize that the State could not deny employment to one simply because he unintentionally lent indirect aid to the cause of violent overthrow by engaging in lawful activities that he knew might add to the power of persons supporting illegal overthrow. 51



More precisely drawn oaths survived vagueness attacks but fell before First Amendment objections in the next three cases. Elfbrandt v. Russell 52 involved an oath that as supplemented would have been violated by one who ''knowingly and willfully becomes or remains a member of the communist party . . . or any other organization having for its purposes the overthrow by force or violence of the government'' with ''knowledge of said unlawful purpose of said organization.'' The law's blanketing in of ''knowing but guiltless'' membership was invalid, wrote Justice Douglas for the Court, because one could be a knowing member but not subscribe to the illegal goals of the organization; moreover, it appeared that one must also have participated in the unlawful activities of the organization before public employment could be denied. 53 Next, in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 54 the oath provisions sustained in Adler 55 were declared unconstitutional. A number of provisions were voided as vague, 56 but the Court held invalid a new provision making Communist Party membership prima facie evidence of disqualification for employment because the opportunity to rebut the presumption was too limited. It could be rebutted only by denying membership, denying knowledge of advocacy of illegal overthrow, or denying that the organization advocates illegal overthrow. But ''legislation which sanctions membership unaccompanied by specific intent to further the unlawful goals of the organization or which is not active membership violates constitutional limitations.'' 57 Similarly, in Whitehill v. Elkins, 58 the oath, revised, upheld in Gerende, 59 was voided because the Court thought it might include within its proscription innocent membership in an organization which advocated illegal overthrow of government.



More recent cases do not illuminate whether membership changes in the Court presage a change in view with regard to the loyalty-oath question. In Connell v. Higginbotham 60 an oath provision reading ''that I do not believe in the overthrow of the Government of the United States or of the State of Florida by force or violence'' was invalidated because the statute provided for summary dismissal of an employee refusing to take the oath, with no opportunity to explain that refusal. Cole v. Richardson 61 upheld a clause in an oath ''that I will oppose the overthrow of the government of the United States of America or of this Commonwealth by force, violence, or by any illegal or unconstitutional method'' upon the construction that this clause was mere ''repetition, whether for emphasis or cadence,'' of the first part of the oath, which was a valid ''uphold and defend'' positive oath.



Legislative Investigations and the First Amendment .--The power of inquiry by congressional and state legislative committees in order to develop information as a basis for legislation 62 is subject to some uncertain limitation when the power as exercised results in deterrence or penalization of protected beliefs, associations and conduct. While the Court initially indicated that it would scrutinize closely such inquiries in order to curb First Amendment infringement, 63 later cases balanced the interests of the legislative bodies in inquiring about both protected and unprotected associations and conduct against what were perceived to be limited restraints upon the speech and association rights of witnesses, and upheld wide-ranging committee investigations. 64 More recently, the Court has placed the balance somewhat differently and required that the investigating agency show ''a subordinating interest which is compelling'' to justify the restraint on First Amendment rights which the Court found would result from the inquiry. 65 The issues in this field, thus, must be considered to be unsettled pending further judicial consideration.



Interference With War Effort .--Unlike the dissent to United States participation in World War I, which provoked several prosecutions, 66 the dissent to United States action in Vietnam was subjected to little legal attack. Possibly the most celebrated governmental action, the prosecution of Dr. Spock and four others for conspiring to counsel, aid, and abet persons to evade or to refuse obligations under the Selective Service System, failed to reach the Supreme Court. 67 Aside from a comparatively minor case, 68 the Court's sole encounter with a Vietnam War protest allegedly involving protected ''symbolic conduct'' was United States v. O'Brien. 69 That case affirmed a conviction and upheld a congressional prohibition against destruction of draft registration certificates; O'Brien had publicly burned his card. ''We cannot accept the view that an apparently limitless variety of conduct can be labeled 'speech' whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea. However, even on the assumption that the alleged communicative element in O'Brien's conduct is sufficient to bring into play the First Amendment, it does not necessarily follow that the destruction of a registration certificate is constitutionally protected activity. This Court has held that when 'speech' and 'nonspeech' elements are combined in the same course of conduct, a sufficiently important governmental interest in regulating the nonspeech element can justify incidental limitations on First Amendment freedoms.'' 70 Finding that the Government's interest in having registrants retain their cards at all times was an important one and that the prohibition of destruction of the cards worked no restriction of First Amendment freedoms broader than that needed to serve the interest, the Court upheld the statute. More recently, the Court upheld a ''passive enforcement'' policy singling out for prosecution for failure to register for the draft those young men who notified authorities of an intention not to register for the draft and those reported by others. 71



Suppression of Communist Propaganda in the Mails .--A 1962 statute authorizing the Post Office Department to retain all mail from abroad which was determined to be ''communist political propaganda'' and to forward it to an addressee only upon his request was held unconstitutional in Lamont v. Postmaster General. 72 The Court held that to require anyone to request receipt of mail determined to be undesirable by the Government was certain to deter and inhibit the exercise of First Amendment rights to receive information. 73 Distinguishing Lamont, the Court in 1987 upheld statutory classification as ''political propaganda'' of communications or expressions by or on behalf of foreign governments, foreign ''principals,'' or their agents, and reasonably adapted or intended to influence United States foreign policy. 74 ''The physical detention of materials, not their mere designation as 'communist political propaganda,' was the offending element of the statutory scheme [in Lamont].'' 75



Exclusion of Certain Aliens as a First Amendment Problem .--While a nonresident alien might be able to present no claim, based on the First Amendment or on any other constitutional provision, to overcome a governmental decision to exclude him from the country, it was arguable that United States citizens who could assert a First Amendment interest in hearing the alien and receiving information from him, such as the right recognized in Lamont, could be able to contest such exclusion. 76 But the Court declined to reach the First Amendment issue and to place it in balance when it found that a governmental refusal to waive a statutory exclusion 77 was on facially legitimate and neutral grounds; the Court's emphasis, however, upon the ''plenary'' power of Congress over admission or exclusion of aliens seemed to indicate where such a balance might be drawn. 78
- See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/annotation13.html#sthash.DLn1eNJn.dpuf

 

Logan Act


The Logan Act (1 Stat. 613, 30 January 1799, currently codified at 18 U.S.C. § 953) is a United States federal law that forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. It was passed in 1799 and last amended in 1994. Violation of the Logan Act is a felony, punishable under federal law with imprisonment of up to three years.

The Act was intended to prohibit United States citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments.


Background

Passed under the administration of President John Adams, during tension between the U.S. and France, it was informally named for Dr. George Logan of Pennsylvania, a state legislator (and later US Senator) and pacifist who in 1798 engaged in semi-negotiations with France during the Quasi-War.

Kevin Kearney, writing in the Emory Law Journal, described Dr. Logan's activities in France:

Upon his arrival in Paris, he met with various French officials, including Talleyrand. During these meetings, he identified himself as a private citizen, discussed matters of general interest to the French, and told his audience that anti-French sentiment was prevalent in the United States. Logan's conversation with Merlin de Douai, who occupied the highest political office in the French republic, was typical. Logan stated that he did not intend to explain the American government's position, nor to criticize that of France. Instead, he suggested ways in which France could improve relations with the United States, to the benefit of both countries. He also told Merlin that pro-British propagandists in the United States were portraying the French as corrupt and anxious for war, and were stating that any friend of French principles necessarily was an enemy of the United States. Within days of Logan's last meeting, the French took steps to relieve the tensions between the two nations; they lifted the trade embargo then in place, and released American seamen held captive in French jails. Even so, it seems that Logan's actions were not the primary cause of the Directory's actions; instead, Logan had merely provided convenient timing for the implementation of a decision that had already been made.

Despite the apparent success of Logan's mission, his activities aroused the opposition of the Federalist Party in Congress, who were resentful of the praise showered on Logan by oppositional Democratic-Republican newspapers. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, also of Pennsylvania, responded by suggesting that Congress "act to curb the temerity and impudence of individuals affecting to interfere in public affairs between France and the United States." The result was the Logan Act, which was pushed through by the Federalist majority (60-46 in the House; and 22-10 in the Senate) with relatively little debate.

Subsequently, Logan himself was appointed and then elected as a Democratic-Republican to the United States Senate from Pennsylvania to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of John Peter G. Muhlenberg and served from July 13, 1801, to March 3, 1807. He was unsuccessful in getting the Logan Act repealed. Logan declined to be a candidate for reelection. Nonetheless, despite the Logan Act, he went to England in 1810 on a private diplomatic mission as an emissary of peace in the period before the outbreak of the War of 1812, but was not successful.

Text of the Logan Act
§ 953. Private correspondence with foreign governments.Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply himself, or his agent, to any foreign government, or the agents thereof, for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.
1 Stat. 613, January 30, 1799, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 953 (2004).

Government action under the Act

In general, the Act is intended to prohibit American citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments. Although attempts have been made to repeal the Act, it remains law and at least a potential sanction to be used against anyone who without authority interferes in the foreign relations of the United States.

Washington has threatened to use the act to stop Americans from negotiating with foreign governments. For example, in February 1941 Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles told the press that former President Herbert Hoover might be a target for prosecution because of his negotiations with European nations over sending food relief.

The only known indictment under the Logan Act was one that occurred in 1803 when a grand jury indicted Francis Flournoy, a Kentucky farmer, who had written an article in the Frankfort Guardian of Freedom under the pen name of "A Western American." In the article, Flournoy advocated a separate nation in the western part of the United States that would ally with France. The United States Attorney for Kentucky, an Adams appointee and brother-in-law of Chief Justice John Marshall, went no further than procuring the indictment of Flournoy. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory later that year appeared to cause the separatism issue to become moot.

In the only other known case, US citizen John D. Martin, a prisoner of war in North Korea, was brought before a court-martial for collaborating with North Korean authorities and conducting "re-education" classes in the prison camp where he was held. The case was dismissed because the court-martial had no jurisdiction over acts he committed after the expiration of his enlistment.

In 1967, an indictment was seriously considered against Stokely Carmichael for his visit that year to Hanoi during the Vietnam War. No action, however, was taken.

During the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon campaign officials, through Anna Chennault, advised Saigon to refuse participation in peace talks, promising a better deal once elected. Defense Secretary Clark Clifford thought the move illegal, and President Lyndon B. Johnson called it treasonous, but did not want to reveal that the NSA was intercepting communications in Vietnam.

In 1975, Senators John Sparkman and George McGovern were accused of violating the Logan Act when they traveled to Cuba and met with officials there. In considering that case, the U.S. Department of State concluded:

The clear intent of this provision [Logan Act] is to prohibit unauthorized persons from intervening in disputes between the United States and foreign governments. Nothing in section 953 [Logan Act], however, would appear to restrict members of the Congress from engaging in discussions with foreign officials in pursuance of their legislative duties under the Constitution. In the case of Senators McGovern and Sparkman the executive branch, although it did not in any way encourage the Senators to go to Cuba , was fully informed of the nature and purpose of their visit, and had validated their passports for travel to that country.

Senator McGovern’s report of his discussions with Cuban officials states: "I made it clear that I had no authority to negotiate on behalf of the United States — that I had come to listen and learn...." (Cuban Realities: May 1975, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., August 1975). Senator Sparkman’s contacts with Cuban officials were conducted on a similar basis. The specific issues raised by the Senators (e.g., the Southern Airways case; Luis Tiant’s desire to have his parents visit the United States) would, in any event, appear to fall within the second paragraph of Section 953.

Accordingly, the Department does not consider the activities of Senators Sparkman and McGovern to be inconsistent with the stipulations of Section 953.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan stated that the activities of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had traveled to Cuba and Nicaragua that year and had returned with several Cuban political prisoners seeking asylum in the United States, may have violated the Logan Act; but Jackson was never indicted.

In 1987 and 1988, President Reagan was furious at what he felt to be House Speaker Jim Wright's "intrusion" into the negotiations between Nicaragua's Sandinista government and the Contras for a cease-fire in the long civil war. The National Security Council considered using the Logan Act to muzzle Wright, but nothing ever came of it.

Constitutionality of the Act

There has been little judicial discussion of the constitutionality of the Logan Act.

In United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936), however, Justice Sutherland wrote in the majority opinion: "[T]he President alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation. He makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate; but he alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation the Senate cannot intrude, and Congress itself is powerless to invade it." Sutherland also notes in his opinion the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report to the Senate of February 15, 1816:

The President is the constitutional representative of the United States with regard to foreign nations. He manages our concerns with foreign nations, and must necessarily be most competent to determine when, how, and upon what subjects negotiation may be urged with the greatest prospect of success. For his conduct, he is responsible to the Constitution.

The Southern District of New York in Waldron v. British Petroleum Co., 231 F. Supp. 72 (S.D.N.Y. 1964), mentioned in passing that the Act was likely unconstitutional due to the vagueness of the terms "defeat" and "measures," but did not rule on the question.

In a memorandum dated September 29, 2006, and entitled "MEMORANDUM FOR ALL MEMBERS AND OFFICERS, from the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct of the United States House of Representatives, regarding the subject of "Post-Employment and Related Restrictions for Members and Officers," members of the House who were leaving office were cautioned regarding activities that may implicate the Logan Act: 'Members should further be aware of a permanent federal statutory restriction that prohibits any U.S. citizen acting without authority of the United States from: "Directly or indirectly commencing or carrying on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government, or any officer or agent thereof, with the intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.'"

The House memo goes on to state that the Logan Act "has never been the basis of a prosecution, and this Committee has publicly questioned its constitutionality. House Comm. on Standards of Official Conduct, Manual of Offenses and Procedures, Korean Influence Investigation, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. 18-19 (Comm. Print 1977). Members should be aware, however, that the law remains on the books."

Proposed congressional actions

The chair of the House Judiciary Committee in the 109th Congress, F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, proposed a comprehensive revision and modernization of the federal criminal code in 2006. The bill, H.R. 6253, was not enacted into law. What is noteworthy is that the Logan Act was significantly revamped in the proposed legislation to prohibit only knowingly false statements made under oath. The section revising the Logan Act was proposed to read as follows:

Sec. 923. False statements influencing foreign government — Whoever, in relation to any dispute or controversy between a foreign government and the United States, knowingly makes any untrue statement, either orally or in writing, under oath before any person authorized and empowered to administer oaths, which the affiant has knowledge or reason to believe will, or may be used to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government, or of any officer or agent of any foreign government, to the injury of the United States, or with a view or intent to influence any measure of or action by the United States or any department or agency thereof, to the injury of the United States, shall be imprisoned not more than ten years.

In June 2007, Representative Steve King introduced legislation that would prohibit then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from drawing on Federal funds to travel to foreign states which the U.S. deems to sponsor terrorism. King claimed that Pelosi's dialogue with the Syrian government violated the Logan Act.[10] The amendment was not adopted.



Further reading
Roth, Brad R. 1993. "The First Amendment in the Foreign Affairs Realm: 'Domesticating' the Restrictions on Citizen Participation." Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 2 (spring).
Scoville, Ryan M. 2013. "Legislative Diplomacy" SSRN

 

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The limerick’s origins.

Although no one knows for sure, the limerick form is thought to have germinated in France during the Middle Ages, after which it crossed the English Channel. An 11th century manuscript demonstrates the limerick’s cadence:

The lion is wondrous strong
And full of the wiles of wo;
And whether he pleye
Or take his preye
He cannot do but slo (slay)

The form contains five lines with trimeter (three-beat) measures in the first, second, and fifth lines and dimeter (two-beat) measures in the second and fourth. While this rhyme scheme of abccb differs from an Irish limerick, the similarity is unmistakable.


From Shakespeare to Mother Goose.

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Little Miss Muffet
The limerick became rooted in children’s literature thanks to Mother Goose nursery rhymes. (William Wallace Denslow, Denslow’s Mother Goose, 1902)

Five centuries later, William Shakespeare used the limerick’s rhythm in Stephano’s drinking song in The Tempest, as well as in Othello and King Lear. Yet it wasn’t until the early 1700s that soldiers returning from the continent-wide War of the Spanish Succession brought the limerick form to Ireland. In 1776, it appeared in published form in Mother Goose’s Melodies; 25 years later, when Mother Goose nursery rhymes attained fame, the limerick was forever affixed to children’s literature. During that time, a group of local Irish poets composed limericks during drinking sessions at various pubs – including, some say, a pub in Limerick that was already noted for its pub crawl chorus, "Will you please come up to Limerick?"

The limerick craze.

The limerick appeared throughout Irish and British literature in the mid-19th century, most notably the printing (1846) and reprinting (1863) of Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense, the latter celebrating Lear’s 40-plus years of writing what he called "nonsense verse." While Lear didn’t invent the form, he certainly popularized it. From that release came a magazine, Punch, that ran limerick contests and launched the limerick craze. By century’s end, poets and writers such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Mark Twain experimented with and published the form. Limericks became the subjects of weekly newspaper contests, with large prizes awarded. The humor and easy creation of limericks infused oral poetry across class-lines. Wrote one critic, "It is the vehicle of cultivated, unrepressed sexual humor in the English language."

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Edward Lear was instrumental in popularizing the limerick. (Self-portrait, from Edward Lear’s Nonsense Omnibus {1943}, Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd.)

Limerick experimentation.

Like its more staid poetic cousins, the limerick has undergone experimentation and adaptation. The traditional five-line verse has been joined by such variations as the double limerick (10 lines), extended limerick (six lines), reverse limerick (replies to other limericks), beheaded limerick (nonsense verse), tongue-twisters, limeraiku (three lines, 5-7-5 syllable count), and truncated limerick (short last line).

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Limericks and LIMERICKS.

Limerick expert Don Marquis identified three types of limericks: "limericks to be told when ladies are present; limericks to be told when ladies are absent but clergymen are present; and LIMERICKS."


Delightful simplicity.

A look at memorable limericks, each with five lines and an aabba rhyme scheme, clearly shows their intended audiences, as well as the bawdiness, nonsense, humor, and delightful storytelling simplicity of the form.


There was an Old Man of Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
His daughter, called Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
- Anonymous


There was a young lady of Lucca
Whose lovers completely forsook her;
She ran up a tree
And said "Fiddle-de-dee!"
Which embarrassed the people of Lucca.
- Edward Lear

There was a Young Lady whose chin
Resembled the point of a pin:
So she had it made sharp,
And purchased a harp,
And played several tunes with her chin.
- Edward Lear

Few thought he was even a starter;
There were many who thought themselves smarter,
But he ended a PM
CH and OM
An earl and a Knight of the Garter.
- Clement Attlee

There once was a man from Peru
Who had a lot of growing up to do,
He’d ring a doorbell,
then run like hell,
Until the owner shot him with a .22.
- Anonymous


A bather whose clothing was strewed
By winds that left her quite nude
Saw a man come along
And unless we are wrong
You expected this line to be lewd.
- Anonymous


There was an old man with a beard
Who said, "it’s just how I feared!
Two owls and a hen
Four larks and a wren
Have all built their nests in my beard.
- Anonymous


Limerick (poetry)

A limerick is a form of poetry,[1] especially one in five-line anapestic meter with a strict rhyme scheme (AABBA), which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. The first, second and fifth lines are usually longer than the third and fourth. The form can be found in England as of the early years of the 18th century.[2] It was popularized by Edward Lear in the 19th century,[3] although he did not use the term.

The following limerick is of unknown origin:
The limerick packs laughs anatomicalInto space that is quite economical. But the good ones I've seenSo seldom are cleanAnd the clean ones so seldom are comical.
Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene, and cites similar opinions by Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw,[5] describing the clean limerick as a "periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity." From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive; violation of taboo is part of its function.

Form

The standard form of a limerick is a stanza of five lines, with the first, second and fifth rhyming with one another and having three feet of three syllables each; and the shorter third and fourth lines also rhyming with each other, but having only two feet of three syllables. The defining "foot" of a limerick's meter is usually the anapaest, (ta-ta-TUM), but catalexis (missing a weak syllable at the beginning of a line) and extra-syllable rhyme (which adds an extra unstressed syllable) can make limericks appear amphibrachic (ta-TUM-ta).

The first line traditionally introduces a person and a place, with the place appearing at the end of the first line and establishing the rhyme scheme for the second and fifth lines. In early limericks, the last line was often essentially a repeat of the first line, although this is no longer customary.

Within the genre, ordinary speech stress is often distorted in the first line, and may be regarded as a feature of the form: "There was a young man from the coast;" "There once was a girl from Detroit…" Legman takes this as a convention whereby prosody is violated simultaneously with propriety.[6] Exploitation of geographical names, especially exotic ones, is also common, and has been seen as invoking memories of geography lessons in order to subvert the decorum taught in the schoolroom; Legman finds that the exchange of limericks is almost exclusive to comparatively well-educated males, women figuring in limericks almost exclusively as "villains or victims". The most prized limericks incorporate a kind of twist, which may be revealed in the final line or lie in the way the rhymes are often intentionally tortured, or both. Many limericks show some form of internal rhyme, alliteration or assonance, or some element of word play.

Verses in limerick form are sometimes combined with a refrain to form a limerick song, a traditional humorous drinking song often with obscene verses.

A notable Limerick - which won an Irish 'Listowel Writers Week' prize in 1998 - exemplifies the structure:
Writing a Limerick's absurd,Line one and line five rhyme in word,And just as you've reckonedThey rhyme with the second;The fourth line must rhyme with the third.
Origin of the name

The origin of the name limerick for this type of poem is debated. As of several years ago, its usage was first documented in England in 1898 (New English Dictionary) and in the United States in 1902, but in recent years several earlier uses have been documented. The name is generally taken to be a reference to the City or County of Limerick in Ireland sometimes particularly to the Maigue Poets, and may derive from an earlier form of nonsense verse parlour game that traditionally included a refrain that included "Will [or won't] you come (up) to Limerick?"

The earliest known use of the term limerick for this type of poem is an 1880 reference, in a Saint John, New Brunswick newspaper, to an apparently well-known tune, [Pie]:There was a young rustic named Mallory,who drew but a very small salary. When he went to the show,his purse made him goto a seat in the uppermost gallery.Tune: Won't you come to Limerick.

Edward Lear

The limerick form was popularized by Edward Lear in his first Book of Nonsense (1845) and a later work (1872) on the same theme. Lear wrote 212 limericks, mostly nonsense verse. It was customary at the time for limericks to accompany an absurd illustration of the same subject, and for the final line of the limerick to be a kind of conclusion, usually a variant of the first line ending in the same word.

The following is an example of one of Edward Lear's limericks.
There was a Young Person of SmyrnaWhose grandmother threatened to burn her. But she seized on the cat,and said 'Granny, burn that!You incongruous old woman of Smyrna!'
Lear's limericks were often typeset in three or four lines, according to the space available under the accompanying picture.

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Variations

The idiosyncratic link between spelling and pronunciation in the English language is explored in this Scottish example (where the name Menzies is pronounced /ˈmɪŋɪs/ MING-iss).
A lively young damsel named MenziesInquired: "Do you know what this thenzies?" Her aunt, with a gasp, Replied: "It's a wasp,And you're holding the end where the stenzies."
The limerick form is so well known that it can be parodied in fairly subtle ways. These parodies are sometimes called anti-limericks. The following example, of unknown origin, subverts the structure of the true limerick by changing the number of syllables in the lines.
There was a young man of JapanWhose limericks never would scan. When asked why this was,He replied "It's becauseI always try to fit as many syllables into the last line as ever I possibly can."
Other anti-limericks follow the meter of a limerick but deliberately break the rhyme scheme, like the following example, attributed to W.S. Gilbert, in a parody of a limerick by Lear:
There was an old man of St. Bees,Who was stung in the arm by a wasp, When asked, "Does it hurt?"He replied, "No, it doesn't,I'm so glad that it wasn't a hornet."
Comedian John Clarke has also parodied Lear's style:
There was an old man with a beard,A funny old man with a beard He had a big beardA great big old beardThat amusing old man with a beard.[15]
Web Cartoonist Zach Weiner, author of SMBC-Comics, wrote a reversed limerick that makes sense read top-to-bottom, and vice versa.
This limerick goes in reverse Unless I'm remissThe neat thing is this:If you start from the bottom-most verseThe limerick's not any worse.

Notes

1.Jump up ^ Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition, 1989), s.v. Limerick.
Vaughn, Stanton. Limerick Lyrics. 1900. Retrieved from [1].

2.Jump up ^ An interesting and highly esoteric verse in limerick form is found in the diary of the Rev. John Thomlinson (1692–1761): The scansion of the modern limerick is different, the long lines 1,2 and 5 consisting of an unstressed initial syllable followed by two trochees and a spondee, with lines 3 and 4 consisting of two anapests each, so Th There - ONCE was a - MAN of Dar - JEE LING Who - BOARD ed a - BUS bound for - EA LING It said ON - the door DO not spit ON - the floor SO He - LAY down and - SPAT on the - CEI LING 1717. Sept. 17th. One Dr. Bainbridge went from Cambridge to Oxon [Oxford] to be astronomy professor, and reading a lecture happened to say de Polis et Axis, instead of Axibus. Upon which one said, Dr. Bainbridge was sent from Cambridge,—to read lectures de Polis et Axis; but lett them that brought him hither, return him thither, and teach him his rules of syntaxis. From Six North Country Diaries, Publications of the Surtees Society, Vol. CXVIII for the year MCMX, p. 78. Andrews & Co., Durham, etc. 1910.

9.Jump up ^ The phrase "come to Limerick" is known in American Slang since the Civil War, as documented in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang and subsequent posts on the American Dialect Society List. One meaning for the phrase, proposed by Stephen Goranson on ADS-list, would be a reference to the Treaty of Limerick, and mean surrender, settle, get to the point, get with the program.

References
Baring-Gould, William Stuart and Ceil Baring-Gould (1988). The Annotated Mother Goose, Random House.
Brandreth, Gyles (1986). Everyman's Word Games
Cohen, Gerald (compiler) (2010). "Stephen Goranson's research into _limerick_: a preliminary report". Comments on Etymology vol. 40, no. 1-2. (October–November 2010) pages 2–11.
Legman, Gershon (1964). The Horn Book, University Press.
Legman, Gershon (1988). The Limerick, Random House.
Loomis, C. Grant (1963). Western Folklore, Vol. 22, No. 3 (July, 1963).
Wells, Carolyn (1903). A Nonsense Anthology, Charles Scribner's Sons.


http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=982

http://oedilf.com/

http://www.limerickcity.ie/Library/LocalStudies/LocalStudiesFiles/L/Limericks5-linecomicverse/

http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~dilcher/limericks.html


Poetic Form: Limerick

A popular form in children’s verse, the limerick is often comical, nonsensical, and sometimes even lewd. The form is well known to generations of English-speaking readers, by way of Mother Goose nursery rhymes, first published in 1791. Composed of five lines, the limerick adheres to a strict rhyme scheme and bouncy rhythm, making it easy to memorize.

Typically, the first two lines rhyme with each other, the third and fourth rhyme together, and the fifth line either repeats the first line or rhymes with it. The limerick’s anapestic rhythm is created by an accentual pattern that contains many sets of double weakly-stressed syllables. The pattern can be illustrated with dashes denoting weak syllables, and back-slashes for stresses:

1) - / - - / - - /
2) - / - - / - - /
3) - / - - /
4) - / - - /
5) - / - - / - - /

Though the origin of the limerick is not entirely known, it has an active, if not long, history. Limericks published in eighteenth-century Mother Goose’s Melodies are thought to be among the oldest. Poets quickly adopted the form and published limericks widely. Among them, Edward Lear’s self-illustrated Book of Nonsense, from 1846, remains a benchmark. He preferred the term “nonsense” to “limerick," and wrote many funny examples, including the following:

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!”

Other limericks can be found in the work of Lord Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and W.S. Gilbert. A good collection of limericks can be found in the Penguin Book of Limericks edited by E. O. Parrott.
...

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A Short History of the Sonnet

Invented in Italy in the thirteenth century, the sonnet was brought to a high form of development in the fourteenth century by Francesco Petrarch (1304–74), Italian poet and humanist best remembered now for his sonnets dedicated to an idealized lady named Laura glimpsed in a church, and with whom he fell in love at first sight, or so the legend goes. Laura’s true identity is unknown; supposedly, she married someone else and, being ideally virtuous as well as beautiful, was permanently unavailable. There’s no evidence Petrarch ever talked to her.

The uses Petrach made of the conventions of courtly love for a beautiful, unattainable lady became known as “Petrarchan conventions.” Some of these are that love is excruciatingly painful; the angelically beautiful and virtuous lady is cruel in rejecting the poet’s love; and love is a religion, the practice of which ennobles the lover. Christian and classical imagery coexist. The god of Love, Cupid, is unpredictable, powerful, and cruel. The eyes are the “windows to the soul,” and love usually begins at first sight. The poet is subject to extremes of feeling and internal conflict—the “war within the self.” Life is short and art, fortunately, is long. The poetry will outlive the poet.

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1502–42) and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (1517–47), are credited with introducing the Petrarchan model to England in the sixteenth century and adjusting the rhyme scheme and the meter to accommodate the English language. They, like Petrarch, use religious imagery and terms to convey the holiness and intensity of the lover’s passion for the unattainable love-object and make frequent allusions to both classical deities and Christian symbols.

This model exerted a strong influence on numerous English Renaissance poets: Spenser, Sidney, Sidney’s brilliant niece Mary Wroth, among others, and of course, Shakespeare himself. Writing sonnet sequences became popular among gentlemen, and these poems were often circulated in manuscript form, evidently including Shakespeare’s. Publication was not generally considered gentlemanly or ladylike.

Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets published in 1609 are a “collection” rather than a sequence, although there are some groupings that look like mini-sequences. And they are remarkably various: Shakespeare explores the same theme in different ways but never exactly repeats a pattern. He is keenly aware of Petrarchan conventions and often uses them, but just as often upends them, as in Sonnet 130. The cruel loved one in many of his sonnets is a young man, not a woman, and the “Dark Lady” of sonnets 127–152 is neither virtuous nor ideally beautiful. Shakespeare’s Sonnets represented a kind of apogée of the English sonnet-writing fashion, and, in fact, may have contributed to the vogue’s fading away, since no one could outdo him or even come close to matching his skill and versatility.

The sonnet has proved to be a remarkably durable and adaptable form—a “fixed form” that is, paradoxically, enormously flexible. Although no one has ever equaled Shakespeare’s sonnets, nearly every notable poet writing in English has had a go at a sonnet or two. Among the best-known British writers of sonnets are John Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, W.H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas.

The form survived the transatlantic crossing. Distinguished American practitioners include Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Crowe Ransom, as well as significant African-American and Caribbean-American poets, such as James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Derek Walcott, Marilyn Nelson, and Claude McKay.

The sonnet can be a lens through which to look at poetry over the last 400 years.



The Sonnet - Its Characteristics and History

William Sharp
From Sonnets of This Century


It is generally agreed that "sonnet" is an abbreviation of the Italian sonetto, a short strain (literally, a little sound), that word being the diminutive of suono = sound. The sonetto was originally a poem recited with sound, that is, with a musical accompaniment, a short poem of the rispetto kind, sung to the strains of lute or mandolin. Probably it had an existence, and possibly even its name, at a period considerably anterior to that where we first find definite mention of it, just as the irregular stanzaic form known as the ballad existed in England and Scotland prior to any generally accepted definition thereof. As to its first birthplace there is some uncertainty: it has been asserted to have been a native of Provence, that mother of poets, but some have it that the sonnet is an outcome of the Greek epigram. This idea is certainly not defensible, but while it has been ridiculed as unworthy of entertainment the scoffers seem generally to have had in mind the modern epigram, a very different thing: the essential principle of the ancient epigram was the presentment of a single idea, emotion, or fact, and in this it is entirely at one with the rival that has supplanted it--but in technique it was much simpler. It is much more likely that the stornello was the Italian equivalent of the sonnet--that fleeting bar of verbal melody, which in its narrow compass of two lines presents one fact of nature and one metaphorical allusion based thereon. The stornello stands in perhaps even closer relationship to the ancient epigram than the rispetto to the modern sonnet. To readers interested in the true epigram, and unacquainted with recent translations of or works thereon, I may recommend Dr. Richard Garnett's delightful little volume, Idylls and Epigrams (Macmillan), and Mr. William Watson's Original Epigrams, with its admirable Note. Housman compares the epigram and the sonnet to the well-known Grecian architectural types, the Ionic column and the Corinthian--the former a specimen of pure and graceful beauty, the latter of more elaborate but still of equally pure and graceful genius. A very far-fetched theory is that the sonnet is an Italian shadow of the ancient ode, its divisions corresponding with the strophe, antistrophe, epode, and antepode. It is not in the least likely that this may have been its origin; it is scarcely more probable that its source may have been the ancient epigram; in all likelihood it was of Sicilian birth, gradually forming or being moulded into a certain recognised type, and apparently the outcome of the stornelli which every contadino sang as he pruned his olive-trees or tended his vines. It ought to be mentioned, also, that another origin has been claimed for the word, viz., that it is the French sonnette and that its parentage may be primarily ascribed to the tinkling sheep-bells of Provençal days. The stornello is the germ of its popular allies, the sestina rima, ottava rima, and the rispetto. The stornello consists of two lines, or it may be of four, on two rhymes; and from this metrical type issues in time the sonnet. The sestina rima is the original quatrain with an added couplet on a new rhyme; the ottava rima is an expansion of the original form into six lines on two rhymes, with a concluding couplet as in the sestina; in the rispetto, as accurately characterised by Mr. J. A. Symonds, the quatrain is doubled or prolonged indefinitely, and is followed by an additional system of one or more couplets which return or reflect upon the original theme: the quatrain or its expansion is composed upon two rhymes--the prolongation, or return, is composed upon two other rhymes. In the sonnet the germinal four lines have developed into two quatrains, still on two rhymes: and the prolongation invariably consists of six lines, on either two or three rhymes, with some freedom of arrangement.

Like a plant of steady growth, the seedling of the sonnet, having fallen into suitable ground somewhere about the middle of the thirteenth century, gradually forced its obscure and tortuous way towards the light. Considerably before the close of the thirteenth century we find it in fulfilled bud, in due time to open into the mature Petrarcan flower, the perfected stock whence such a multiplicity of varieties has come. Many buds did, indeed, arise about the same period, and there is still preserved at Milan (according to Muratori, in his Perfetta Poesia) a manuscript Latin treatise on poems in the Italian vernacular--Poetica volgare--written in the year 1332 by a learned and ingenious judge of Padua named Antonio di Tempo, wherein mention is made of sixteen distinct species of sonnet, most of them posterior to the unfolding of the finest and most energetic bud, but some anterior thereto. To carry on the metaphor a little further, the gardener who tended and cultivated this choice bud was a certain clerical poet known widely as Fra Guittone d'Arezzo--not the least worthy among the illustrious little band which that small Italian town has produced. At the same time, such honour as is due must be rendered to a little known predecessor in the art, the author of the sonnet beginning Però ch'amore, which, as Mr. Symonds has pointed out, is presumably the earliest extant example of this metrical structure. The poet in question was Pier delle Vigne, Secretary of State to Frederick II. of Sicily, and while his little poem differs from the typical Italian sonnet in that the rhyme-arrangement of the octave is simply that of two ordinary conjoint quatrains, or two rhymes throughout, it is a true example in all other particulars. Fra Guittone flourished during the greater part of the thirteenth century, and he it was who first definitely adopted and adhered to what was even then recognised as the best modern form for the expression of an isolated emotion, thought, or idea. His sonnets are not only the model of those of his great successor, Petrarca, but are also in themselves excellent productions, and especially noteworthy when considered in relation to the circumstances under which they came into existence. From the work of Guittone d'Arezzo--whom Capel Lofft called the Columbus of poetic literature, from his having discovered the sonnet even as the Genoese navigator discovered America--to that of the sweetest-voiced of all Italian poets, there is a considerable step. The period was eminently an experimental one, and in sonnet-literature as elsewhere. While the Guittonian sonnet remained the most admired model, many variations thereof and divergences therefrom became temporarily popular, exerting an unfortunate influence by allowing free scope to slovenly or indifferent workmanship. But Petrarca and Dante laid an ineffaceable seal on the Guittonian form, not prohibiting minor variations, and even themselves indulging in experimental divergences: in the hands of the one it gained an exquisite beauty, a subtle music abidingly sweet, and in those of the other a strength and vigour that supplied as it were the masculine element to the already existent feminine. Tasso and the other great Italians followed suit, and the sonnet became the favourite Italian poetic vehicle, as it remains to this day, though, alas! but the body still lives, the soul having fled or--it may be--lying in a profound and apparently undisturbable trance. Mr. Symonds has objected that this statement can hardly be taken literally in view of the excellent poems of Stecchetti and the Veristi, but, broadly speaking, it can hardly be doubted that the sonnet in Italy has fallen upon evil days when it is mostly to be found adorning young ladies' albums, or as an accompaniment to presents of flowers and confectionery. In due course Camoens in the South, Bellay and the early French poets in the West, and Surrey and Spenser in England, turned towards this form as birds towards a granary unroofed by the wind. Concerning Mr. Hall Caine's theory that the English sonnet is an indigenous growth, I shall have something to say later on.

The first English sonnets were composed by Sir Thomas Wyat (1503-1542), and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1517-1547); and the first appearance of any in book form was in the rare publication briefly known as Tottle's Miscellany, whose full title is "Songs and Sonettes written by the ryght honourable lorde Henry Howard late earle of Surrey, and other." These accomplished young noblemen had resided in Italy, and, themselves delighting in Italian poetic literature--especially Petrarca's work--hastened, on their return to their own country, to acclimatise the new poetic vehicle which had become so famous in the hands of two of Italy's greatest writers. Their efforts, with a new and difficult medium and a language which was still only approaching that state in which Spenser and Marlowe and Shakespeare found it, were only very partially successful, and, as we now know, their sonnets owed most of what was excellent in them to Italian sources. The remarkable thing about them is that they all end with rhymed-couplets, an arrangement distinctly opposed to any with which they were acquainted in another language. On the other hand, it must be noted (this point should be remembered a little later when we come to discuss Mr. Caine's theory) that Wyat's are otherwise mostly on the Italian model. Surrey, again, evidently found his task over-difficult of satisfactory performance, and so constantly experimented with a fourteen-line sonnet-mould--like a musician who, arriving in his own land, finds his countrymen's ears not easily attuned to the instrument he brings with him from abroad, and so tries again and again to find some way of making his novel mandolin or lute-sounds attractive to ears accustomed to the harsher strains of fife or windpipe. Thus we find him composing on the two-rhyme-throughout system; linking the three elegiac quatrains and a couplet; and otherwise feeling his way--evidently coming ultimately to the conclusion that the three quatrains and the couplet constituted the form best suited to the English language. This may concisely be set forth in the following formula:--

A--B--A--B C--D--C--D E--F--E--F G--G

A much more original and more potent poetic nature next endeavoured to find meet expression in the sonnet. Spenser, that great metricist and genuine poet, nowithstanding all his power in verse, was unable to acclimatise the new vehicle, the importance and beauty of which he undoubtedly fully recognised. Having tried the effect of a fourteen-line poem in well-modulated blank verse, he found that he was dissatisfied with the result; equally dissatisfied was he with the quatrains-and-couplet mould of Wyat and Surrey: and so at last, after continuous experiments, he produced a modification of both the English and the Italian form, retaining something of the rhyme-iteration of the latter along with the couplet-ending of the former: or perhaps he simply adopted this structure from a similar Italian experiment, discerning through translation its seeming appropriateness. That he considered this the best possible mould of the sonnet for the English poet is evident from the fact that in this structure he composed his famous love sonnets, the Amoretti. The Spenserian sonnet may be regarded as representing that transitional stage of development which a tropical plant experiences when introduced into a temperate clime. In this case the actual graft proved short-lived, but the lesson was not lost upon cultivators, in whose hands manifold seed lay ready for germination. Spenser's method was to interlace the quatrains by using the last rhyme-sound of each as the key-note of the next--b2, for example, if I may use a musical comparison, constituting the dominant of b3 and b5, as of course c2 of c3 and c5--and then to clinch those by an independent rhyme-couplet. It will more easily be understood by this formula:--

A--B--A--B
B--C--B--C
C--D--C--D
E--E

But this form pleased the ear neither of his contemporaries nor of his successors: it was suited for gentle tenderness, for a lover's half-assumed langour--but in it neither Dante on the one hand, nor Shakespeare nor Milton on the other, would have found that rhythmical freedom, or rather that amplitude in confinement, which they obtained in the structures they adopted. After Spenser there set in the flood of Elizabethan sonneteering, which culminated in the Shakespearian sonnets. Before mentioning Shakespeare and his immediate forerunners, however, an interesting feature should be noted. This is a fine sonnet foreshadowing what is now called the Miltonic mould, by that great Englishman, Sir Walter Raleigh: though structurally of the Surrey type, it has the Miltonic characteristic of unbroken continuity between octave and sestet. It may be added that the author of Paradise Lost modelled his well-known lines on his dead wife on this sonnet by Raleigh.

What is styled the Shakespearian sonnet is so called only out of deference to the great poet who made such noble use of it: in the same way as Petrarca is accredited with the structural form bearing his name. As "the sweete laureate of Italie" had predecessors in Guittone d'Arezzo and Amalricchi, so Shakespeare found that the English sonnet--as it should be called--having been inefficiently handled by Surrey, discarded by Spenser, taken up and beautified by Sir Philip Sidney (who seemed unable to definitely decide as to what form to adopt), was at last made thoroughly ready for his use by Daniel and Drayton. To show how the so-called Shakespearian sonnet was led up to and how it actually existed in its maturity prior to the splendid poems of the young player-poet, a sonnet by each of these admirable writers may be quoted. But previous thereto it may again be made clear that the English or Shakespearian sonnet is distinctly different from the normal Italian type. Unlike the latter, it is not divided into two systems--though a pause corresponding to that enforced by the separation of octave and sestet is very frequently observed. Instead of having octave and sestet, the Shakespearian sonnet is made up of three elegiac quatrains clinched by a rhymed couplet with a new sound; and, generally, it presents the motive as it were in a transparent sphere, instead of as a cameo with two sides. As regards swiftness of motion, its gain upon the Spenserian, to which it is so closely allied, is great.

Referring, in a chapter dealing with the sonnets of Rossetti, to the two archetypal forms, I wrote some four years ago that "The Shakespearian sonnet is like a red-hot bar being moulded upon a forge till--in the closing couplet--it receives the final clinching blow from the heavy hammer: while the Petrarcan, on the other hand, is like a wind gathering in volume and dying away again immediately on attaining a culminating force." The anterior simile is the happier: for the second I should now be inclined to substitute--the Petrarcan sonnet is like an oratorio, where the musical divisions are distinct, and where the close is a grand swell, the culmination of the foregoing harmonies. Petrarca himself, in one of his numerous marginalia to his sonnets, remarked that the end should invariably be more harmonious than the beginning, i.e., should be dominantly borne-in upon the reader.

In selecting the "Sleep" of Samuel Daniel, I do so not because it is in the true Shakespearian type (as is Drayton's)--though he wrote mostly in the latter mould--but because in this example is shown the final transition from an octave of two rhymes to the English archetype as already formulated. It must not be overlooked, however, that he used and used well the Shakespearian form.

TO SLEEP.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my anguish, and restore the light;
With dark forgetting of my care return,
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth;
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising Sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow;
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

The sonnet by Michael Drayton which I shall next quote is not only the finest of Elizabethan sonets by writers other than Shakespeare, but in condensed passion is equalled only by one or two of those of the great master, and is surpassed by none, either of his or of any later poet:--


A PARTING.

Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part,--
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free:
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vow.
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,--
Now, if thou would'st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover!

But it was in Shakespeare's hands that this form of sonnet first became immutably established in our literature. These magnificent poems--magnificent notwithstanding many minor flaws--must always hold their high place, not only as the personal record of the greatest of our poets, but for the sake of their own consummate beauty and intellectual force. I may repeat the words I wrote in the Introductory Essay to my edition of his Songs and Sonnets--"It is because this great master over the passions and follies and heroisms of man has at least once dropped the veil of impersonality that we are so fascinated by the sonnets. Here the musician who has otherwise played for all generations of humanity, pipes a solitary tune of his own life, its love, its devotion, its fervour, its prophetic exaltation, its passion, its despair, its exceeding bitterness. Veritably we are here face to face with 'a splendour amid glooms.'"

Rossetti, the greatest master of sonnet-music posterior to the "starre of poets," declared while expressing his unbounded admiration for Shakespeare's sonnets that "conception--fundamental brain-work--is what makes the difference in all art. . . A Shakespearian sonnet is better than the most perfect in form because Shakespeare wrote it." Again, the opinion of so acute a critic and genuine a poet as Mr. Theodore Watts may here be appropriately quoted:--"The quest of the Shakespearian form is not," he writes in his article on "The Sonnet" in the Encyclopædia Britannica, "like that of the sonnet of octave and sestet sonority, and, so to speak, metrical counterpoint, but sweetness; and the sweetest of all possible arrangements in English versification is a succession of decasyllabic quatrains in alternate rhymes knit together, and clinched by a couplet--a couplet coming not too far from the initial verse, so as to lose its binding power, and yet not so near the initial verse that the ring of epigram disturbs "the linked sweetness long drawn out" of this movement, but sufficiently near to shed its influence over the poem back to the initial verse." This is admirably expressed, and true so far as it goes; but to a far wider scope than "sweetness" does the Shakespearian sonnet reach. Having already given a good example of sonnets cast in this mould, it is not necessary to quote another by the chief master of the English sonnet: still I may give one of the latters greatest, perhaps the greatest of Shakespeare's or any other, which will not only serve as a supreme example of the type, but will demonstrate a capability of impressiveness unsurpassed by any sonnet of Dante or Milton:--

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.



Sonnet

A sonnet is a poetic form which originated in Italy; Giacomo Da Lentini is credited with its invention.[1]

The term sonnet is derived from the Italian word sonetto (from Old Provençal sonet a little poem, from son song, from Latin sonus a sound). By the thirteenth century it signified a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history.

Writers of sonnets are sometimes called "sonneteers", although the term can be used derisively.

Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet

The sonnet was created by Giacomo da Lentini, head of the Sicilian School under Emperor Frederick II.[2] Guittone d'Arezzo rediscovered it and brought it to Tuscany where he adapted it to his language when he founded the Neo-Sicilian School (1235–1294). He wrote almost 250 sonnets.[3] Other Italian poets of the time, including Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300), wrote sonnets, but the most famous early sonneteer was Petrarca (known in English as Petrarch). Other fine examples were written by Michelangelo.

The structure of a typical Italian sonnet of the time included two parts that together formed a compact form of "argument". First, the octave (two quatrains), forms the "proposition", which describes a "problem", or "question", followed by a sestet (two tercets), which proposes a "resolution". Typically, the ninth line initiates what is called the "turn", or "volta", which signals the move from proposition to resolution. Even in sonnets that don't strictly follow the problem/resolution structure, the ninth line still often marks a "turn" by signaling a change in the tone, mood, or stance of the poem.

Later, the a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a pattern became the standard for Italian sonnets. For the sestet there were two different possibilities: c-d-e-c-d-e and c-d-c-c-d-c. In time, other variants on this rhyming scheme were introduced, such as c-d-c-d-c-d.

In English, both English type (Shakespearean) sonnets and Italian type (Petrarchan) sonnets are traditionally written in iambic pentameter lines.

The first known sonnets in English, written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, used this Italian scheme, as did sonnets by later English poets including John Milton, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Early twentieth-century American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay also wrote most of her sonnets using the Italian form.

This example, On His Blindness by Milton, gives a sense of the Italian rhyming scheme:

When I consider how my light is spent (a)
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, (b)
And that one talent which is death to hide, (b)
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent (a)
To serve therewith my Maker, and present (a)
My true account, lest he returning chide; (b)
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?" (b)
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent (a)
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need (c)
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best (d)
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state (e)
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed (c)
And post o'er land and ocean without rest; (d)
They also serve who only stand and wait." (e)

Dante's variation

Most Sonnets in Dante's La Vita Nuova are Petrarchan, but some are not. Chapter VII[4] gives sonnet "O voi che per la via", with two sestets (AABAAB AABAAB) and two quatrains (CDDC CDDC), and Ch. VIII, "Morte villana", with two sestets (AABBBA AABBBA) and two quatrains (CDDC CDDC).

English (Shakespearean) sonnet

When English sonnets were introduced by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century, his sonnets and those of his contemporary the Earl of Surrey were chiefly translations from the Italian of Petrarch and the French of Ronsard and others. While Wyatt introduced the sonnet into English, it was Surrey who gave it a rhyming meter, and a structural division into quatrains of a kind that now characterizes the typical English sonnet. Having previously circulated in manuscripts only, both poets' sonnets were first published in Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonnetts, better known as Tottel's Miscellany (1557).

It was, however, Sir Philip Sidney's sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) that started the English vogue for sonnet sequences. The next two decades saw sonnet sequences by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and many others. This literature is often attributed to the Elizabethan Age and known as Elizabethan sonnets. These sonnets were all essentially inspired by the Petrarchan tradition, and generally treat of the poet's love for some woman, with the exception of Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets. The form is often named after Shakespeare, not because he was the first to write in this form but because he became its most famous practitioner. The form consists of fourteen lines structured as three quatrains and a couplet. The third quatrain generally introduces an unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic "turn", the volta. In Shakespeare's sonnets, however, the volta usually comes in the couplet, and usually summarizes the theme of the poem or introduces a fresh new look at the theme. With only a rare exception, the meter is iambic pentameter, although there is some accepted metrical flexibility (e.g., lines ending with an extra-syllable feminine rhyme, or a trochaic foot rather than an iamb, particularly at the beginning of a line). The usual rhyme scheme is end-rhymed a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.

This example, Shakespeare's "Sonnet 116", illustrates the form (with some typical variances one may expect when reading an Elizabethan-age sonnet with modern eyes):

Let me not to the marriage of true minds (a)
Admit impediments, love is not love (b)*
Which alters when it alteration finds, (a)
Or bends with the remover to remove. (b)*
O no, it is an ever fixèd mark (c)**
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; (d)***
It is the star to every wand'ring bark, (c)**
Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken. (d)***
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks (e)
Within his bending sickle's compass come, (f)*
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, (e)
But bears it out even to the edge of doom: (f)*
If this be error and upon me proved, (g)*
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (g)*


* PRONUNCIATION/RHYME: Note changes in pronunciation since composition.
** PRONUNCIATION/METER: "Fixed" pronounced as two-syllables, "fix-ed".
*** RHYME/METER: Feminine-rhyme-ending, eleven-syllable alternative.


The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet is also a sonnet, as is Romeo and Juliet's first exchange in Act One, Scene Five, lines 104–117, beginning with "If I profane with my unworthiest hand" (104) and ending with "Then move not while my prayer's effect I take" (117).

In the 17th century, the sonnet was adapted to other purposes, with John Donne and George Herbert writing religious sonnets, and John Milton using the sonnet as a general meditative poem. Both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan rhyme schemes were popular throughout this period, as well as many variants.

The fashion for the sonnet went out with the Restoration, and hardly any sonnets were written between 1670 and Wordsworth's time. However, sonnets came back strongly with the French Revolution. Wordsworth himself wrote hundreds of sonnets, of which amongst the best-known are "Upon Westminster Bridge", "The world is too much with us" and the sonnet "London, 1802" addressed to Milton; his sonnets were essentially modelled on Milton's. Keats and Shelley also wrote major sonnets; Keats's sonnets used formal and rhetorical patterns inspired partly by Shakespeare, and Shelley innovated radically, creating his own rhyme scheme for the sonnet "Ozymandias". Sonnets were written throughout the 19th century, but, apart from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and the sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, there were few very successful traditional sonnets. In Canada during the last decades of the century, the Confederation Poets and especially Archibald Lampman were known for their sonnets, which were mainly on pastoral themes. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote several major sonnets, often in sprung rhythm, such as "The Windhover", and also several sonnet variants such as the 10½-line curtal sonnet "Pied Beauty" and the 24-line caudate sonnet "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire". By the end of the 19th century, the sonnet had been adapted into a general-purpose form of great flexibility.

This flexibility was extended even further in the 20th century. Among the major poets of the early Modernist period, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and E. E. Cummings all used the sonnet regularly. William Butler Yeats wrote the major sonnet "Leda and the Swan", which used half rhymes. Wilfred Owen's sonnet "Anthem for Doomed Youth" was another sonnet of the early 20th century. W. H. Auden wrote two sonnet sequences and several other sonnets throughout his career, and widened the range of rhyme-schemes used considerably. Auden also wrote one of the first unrhymed sonnets in English, "The Secret Agent" (1928). Robert Lowell wrote five books of unrhymed "American sonnets", including his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume The Dolphin (1973). Half-rhymed, unrhymed, and even unmetrical sonnets have been very popular since 1950; perhaps the best works in the genre are Seamus Heaney's Glanmore Sonnets and Clearances, both of which use half rhymes, and Geoffrey Hill's mid-period sequence "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England". The 1990s saw something of a formalist revival, however, and several traditional sonnets have been written in the past decade.

Spenserian sonnet

A variant on the English form is the Spenserian sonnet, named after Edmund Spenser (c.1552–1599), in which the rhyme scheme is abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee. A Spenserian sonnet does not appear to require that the initial octave set up a problem that the closing sestet answers, as with a Petrarchan sonnet. Instead, the form is treated as three quatrains connected by the interlocking rhyme scheme and closed by a couplet. The linked rhymes of his quatrains suggest the linked rhymes of such Italian forms as terza rima. This example is taken from Amoretti:


Happy ye leaves! whenas those lily hands

Happy ye leaves. whenas those lily hands, (a)
Which hold my life in their dead doing might, (b)
Shall handle you, and hold in love's soft bands, (a)
Like captives trembling at the victor's sight. (b)
And happy lines on which, with starry light, (b)
Those lamping eyes will deign sometimes to look,(c)
And read the sorrows of my dying sprite, (b)
Written with tears in heart's close bleeding book. (c)
And happy rhymes! bathed in the sacred brook (c)
Of Helicon, whence she derived is, (d)
When ye behold that angel's blessed look, (c)
My soul's long lacked food, my heaven's bliss. (d)
Leaves, lines, and rhymes seek her to please alone, (e)
Whom if ye please, I care for other none. (e)

Modern sonnet

With the advent of free verse, the sonnet was seen as somewhat old-fashioned and fell out of use for a time among some schools of poets.[citation needed] However, a number of modern poets, including Charles Baudelaire, Wilfred Owen, John Berryman, George Meredith, Edwin Morgan, Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, George Sterling, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Federico García Lorca, E.E. Cummings, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Robert Lowell, Joan Brossa, Vikram Seth, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jan Kal, Ernest Hilbert, Kim Addonizio, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney continued to use the form. Elizabeth Bishop's inverted "Sonnet" was one of her last poems. Ted Berrigan's book, The Sonnets, is an arresting and curious take on the form. Paul Muldoon often experiments with 14 lines and sonnet rhymes, though without regular sonnet meter. The advent of the New Formalism movement in the United States has also contributed to contemporary interest in the sonnet. The sonnet sees its revival with the word sonnet. Concise and visual in effect, word sonnets are fourteen line poems, with one word per line. Frequently allusive and imagistic, they can also be irreverent and playful. The Canadian poet Seymour Mayne published a few collections of word sonnets, and is one of the chief innovators of the form.[16] Contemporary word sonnets combine a variation of styles often considered to be mutually exclusive to separate genres, as demonstrated in works such as An Ode to Mary.[17] Also, the contemporary Greek poet Yannis Livadas began what he termed a "fusion sonnet", consisting of 21 lines, essentially a variable half of a "jazz" sonnet, accompanied by a half sonnet as a coda. Both parts of the poem appear as a whole in a dismantled form of a series of 3, 2, 4, 3, 4, and 5-lined stanzas.[

Bibliography
I. Bell, et al. A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Blackwell Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1-4051-2155-6.
Bertoni, Giulio (1915). I Trovatori d'Italia: Biografie, testi, tradizioni, note. Rome: Società Multigrafica Editrice Somu.
T. W. H. Crosland. The English Sonnet. Hesperides Press, 2006. ISBN 1-4067-9691-3.
J. Fuller. The Oxford Book of Sonnets. Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-280389-1.
J. Fuller. The Sonnet. (The Critical Idiom: #26). Methuen & Co., 1972. ISBN 0-416-65690-0.
J. Hollander. Sonnets: From Dante to the Present. Everyman's Library, 2001. ISBN 0-375-41177-1.
P. Levin. The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. Penguin, 2001. ISBN 0-14-058929-5.
S. Mayne. Ricochet, Word Sonnets - Sonnets d'un mot. Translated by Sabine Huynh. University of Ottawa Press, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7603-0761-2
J. Phelan. The Nineteenth Century Sonnet. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 1-4039-3804-0.
S. Regan. The Sonnet. Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-19-289307-6.
M. R. G. Spiller. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. Routledge, 1992. ISBN 0-415-08741-4.
M. R. G. Spiller. The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of Its Strategies. Twayne Pub., 1997. ISBN 0-8057-0970-3.


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Poetic Form: Sonnet

From the Italian sonetto, which means “a little sound or song," the sonnet is a popular classical form that has compelled poets for centuries. Traditionally, the sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, which employ one of several rhyme schemes and adhere to a tightly structured thematic organization. Two sonnet forms provide the models from which all other sonnets are formed: the Petrachan and the Shakespearean.

Petrarchan Sonnet

The first and most common sonnet is the Petrarchan, or Italian. Named after one of its greatest practitioners, the Italian poet Petrarch, the Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two stanzas, the octave (the first eight lines) followed by the answering sestet (the final six lines). The tightly woven rhyme scheme, abba, abba, cdecde or cdcdcd, is suited for the rhyme-rich Italian language, though there are many fine examples in English. Since the Petrarchan presents an argument, observation, question, or some other answerable charge in the octave, a turn, or volta, occurs between the eighth and ninth lines. This turn marks a shift in the direction of the foregoing argument or narrative, turning the sestet into the vehicle for the counterargument, clarification, or whatever answer the octave demands.

Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the Petrarchan sonnet to England in the early sixteenth century. His famed translations of Petrarch’s sonnets, as well as his own sonnets, drew fast attention to the form. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a contemporary of Wyatt’s, whose own translations of Petrarch are considered more faithful to the original though less fine to the ear, modified the Petrarchan, thus establishing the structure that became known as the Shakespearean sonnet. This structure has been noted to lend itself much better to the comparatively rhyme-poor English language.

Shakespearean Sonnet

The second major type of sonnet, the Shakespearean, or English sonnet, follows a different set of rules. Here, three quatrains and a couplet follow this rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The couplet plays a pivotal role, usually arriving in the form of a conclusion, amplification, or even refutation of the previous three stanzas, often creating an epiphanic quality to the end. In Sonnet 130 of William Shakespeare’s epic sonnet cycle, the first twelve lines compare the speaker’s mistress unfavorably with nature’s beauties. But the concluding couplet swerves in a surprising direction:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Sonnet Variations

Though Shakespeare’s sonnets were perhaps the finest examples of the English sonnet, John Milton’s Italian-patterned sonnets (later known as “Miltonic” sonnets) added several important refinements to the form. Milton freed the sonnet from its typical incarnation in a sequence of sonnets, writing the occasional sonnet that often expressed interior, self-directed concerns. He also took liberties with the turn, allowing the octave to run into the sestet as needed. Both of these qualities can be seen in “When I Consider How my Light is Spent.”

The Spenserian sonnet, invented by sixteenth century English poet Edmund Spenser, cribs its structure from the Shakespearean--three quatrains and a couplet--but employs a series of “couplet links” between quatrains, as revealed in the rhyme scheme: abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee. The Spenserian sonnet, through the interweaving of the quatrains, implicitly reorganized the Shakespearean sonnet into couplets, reminiscent of the Petrarchan. One reason was to reduce the often excessive final couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet, putting less pressure on it to resolve the foregoing argument, observation, or question.

Sonnet Sequences

There are several types of sonnet groupings, including the sonnet sequence, which is a series of linked sonnets dealing with a unified subject. Examples include Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Lady Mary Roth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, published in 1621, the first sonnet sequence by an English woman.

Within the sonnet sequence, several formal constraints have been employed by various poets, including the corona (crown) and sonnet redoublé. In the corona, the last line of the initial sonnet acts as the first line of the next, and the ultimate sonnet’s final line repeats the first line of the initial sonnet. La Corona by John Donne is comprised of seven sonnets structured this way. The sonnet redoublé is formed of 15 sonnets, the first 14 forming a perfect corona, followed by the final sonnet, which is comprised of the 14 linking lines in order.

Modern Sonnets

The sonnet has continued to engage the modern poet, many of whom also took up the sonnet sequence, notably Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. Stretched and teased formally and thematically, today’s sonnet can often only be identified by the ghost imprint that haunts it, recognizable by the presence of 14 lines or even by name only. Recent practitioners of this so-called “American” sonnet include Gerald Stern, Wanda Coleman, Ted Berrigan, and Karen Volkman. Hundreds of modern sonnets, as well as those representing the long history of the form, are collected in the recent anthology The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, edited by Philis Levin.



http://www.sonnets.org/sharp.htm

http://www.sonnets.org/bibliogr.htm#sharp1

 

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Codifying chronicles.

The advent of writing enabled scribes and bards from China, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, and Ancient Egypt to write down odes, Vedas, legends, and myths that had existed in their cultures for thousands of years.

Poetry itself probably dates back to cavemen and the earliest shamans, who chronicled events in picture-stories, symbols, songs, and tales to chronicle hunts and features of the land on which these people survived. Poetry also took nomads into altered or supernatural realms.

As language developed, oral storytellers traveled from place to place in order to recite new legends and tales. Most likely, stanzaic verse began as a series of conscious pauses by oral storytellers during their recitations. Why the pauses? The narrator had to catch his breath and summon the next part of the tale!

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Poetry probably dates back to cavemen and the earliest shamans, who chronicled events in picture-stories. This cave painting in Lascaux, France, is thought to date from between 15000 and 13000 B.C.

Fertile ground for poetic leaps.

Since then, people have depicted their inner and outer worlds – and the worlds of their peers, legends and civilizations – through hundreds or thousands of poetic forms. Like other types of art and music, the evolution of poetry escalated during fertile creative times and in particularly open societies. So, for example, the poetic lyric leapt forward on the wings of two women – Enheduanna and Sappho - during the height of two great cultures, Sumeria and Ancient Greece, and dramatic verse began with the Ancient Greek playwrights, along with Homer’s epics and Aesop’s fables.

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Poetry escalated during fertile creative times and in open societies like Ancient Greece. (Charles Nicholas Rafael Lafond, Sappho Sings for Homer, 1824)

Similarly, Marco Polo’s acquisition of scrolls of Chinese poetry and the influence of Provence’s formes fixes style of courtly poetics informed Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Bocacchio, and other late medieval writers, who ignited Italy’s greatest poetry boom and planted the seeds for the Renaissance. While the sonnet emerged during the Renaissance, free verse roared out of the early 19th century Victorian era. During that time, intellectuals and students felt more liberated, poetry salons sprung up in Paris and London, and poets yearned to break out of the box of rhymed, measured lines and stanzas.

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Marco Polo’s acquisition of scrolls of Chinese poetry (possibly written by Su Shi, the major poet during the Song Dynasty) informed late medieval writers.

Poets may have created, modified, or used poetic forms, but centuries later these same forms provide a snapshot of the civilizations from which they emerged. The gorgeous lyrical love poems of Ancient Greece and Rome reflected cultures open to physical and emotional expression. More than three dozen known forms took root in the Greek culture, including the ode, fable, lyric, and Anacreontic verse. So esteemed was poetry that three of the classic nine Muses inspire specific forms of poetry: Calliope (epic poetry), Erato (love poetry), and Polyrhythmia (sacred poetry). In a culture that routinely mixed poetry, music, and the stage, two others are close cousins: Euterpe (music) and Melpomene (tragedy).

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Calliope, the Greek Muse of epic poetry, holds a copy of Homer’s Odyssey. (Simon Vouet, Les Muses Uranie et Calliope, c. 1634)

When Rome switched from a Republic to an Empire, its poetic forms became more constrained and its subjects bloodier and bawdier. Altar poetry (the ancestor of concrete and visual poetry) emerged from the abbeys of medieval Germany, while the terza rima was Dante’s way of giving us layered morsels of the hell he visited in The Inferno. The canso stanza form, along with rondeau and triolet, emerged from Provence so that medieval troubadours could give information to townspeople without tipping off Crusaders of the Holy Roman Empire. The Germans romped through the Renaissance period with Meistergesang, poem-songs that played directly into the citizenry’s penchant for revelry and national unity. Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays reflected an Elizabethan era when creativity, expression, and experimentation ignited England intellectually.

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Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (pictured above) was a court poet, but canso stanza, rondeau, and triolet forms of poetry enabled other Provencal troubadours to safely relay information during the Crusades. (BNF Richelieu Manuscrits Francais 854, Bibliotheque Nationale Francaise, Paris)

 

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Feeding creative explosions.

For many centuries, poetry movements and communities have served as the most provocative, creative, vital, engaging, and oft-underground elements of regional and national literary trends. The simple joy of gathering for a single or group reading, listening to verse, hearing background stories, and discussing poesy has joined and empowered poets from ancient Athens to the streets of San Francisco. The assemblies launched social and political discourse while feeding creative explosions that, in nearly all cases, involved the arts and music as well.

Stepping into community.

Despite the popular view of most poets as solitary, hermetic people, communities are vital to most working poets – which is why, in any given week, thousands of open-mic and guest poetry readings take place in the United States. Whether we’re studying the history of poetry or listening to an individual poet, it’s enticing to make connections between two poetic periods, or between a poet and his or her influences. In doing so, we invariably set foot inside a poetic movement or community.

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Poetic communities launched social and political discourse, and are vital to working poets. Bob Donlin, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert LaVinge, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (left to right) stand outside Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, California.

Movements through history.

Throughout history, there have been hundreds of major and minor poetic movements and communities. Major community-based movements – such as the Ancient Greek poetry schools, Provencal literature, Sicilian court poets, Elizabethan and Romantic poets, American Transcendentalists, Paris expatriate (Surrealist), and Beat poets – changed the course of poetry during and after their respective eras.

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Claude McKay’s book of poetry, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. McKay was part of a literary community with widespread influence.

While not as well known, tributary movements have been equally rife with provocative thought and contributions to the body of poetics. For example, in the past 50 years in the U.S., poetry has been fed by the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman), San Francisco Renaissance (Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason), Confessionalists (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell), New York School (Ed Sanders), Black Mountain Poets (Mary Caroline Richards), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E avant garde poets (Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout). All responded or reacted to the three major movements of the first half of the 20th century: Imagism (Ezra Pound, h.d.), Objectivism (Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff) and the American contribution to France’s Surrealism (Marianne Moore). This pattern has permeated the wide-rooted, long-branched family tree of community-based poetry.

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Confessionalists, such as Sylvia Plath, were a part of a tributary movement that contributed to the body of poetics.


Insight into ten great movements.

By taking a closer look at ten great community-based movements in Western poetry, we can glean greater insight into their genesis, their contributions to world poetry and literature, and their cultural influences.

Ancient Greek poetry (7th to 4th centuries B.C.)

The pinnacle of ancient Greek poetry lasted three centuries, making it one of the few multi-generational poetic movements and communities. Ancient Greek poets were also unique because they were the first large group to commit their poetry to writing; prior civilizations preferred the oral tradition, though some written poems date back to the 25th century B.C.

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The pinnacle of ancient Greek poetry lasted three centuries.

Greece’s poetic movement was part of the greatest cultural and intellectual community in world history. Poets were often dramatists who wrote for choirs, or courtly muses who entertained regional kings. Hundreds of dramas were performed, each of them featuring exquisite lyric poetry within its three-act structure. The Greeks developed nearly all of the classic forms that formed the underpinnings of later literature, drama, music and poetry, including the ode, epic, lyric, tragedy, and comedy. Among the great poets who passed developing forms to succeeding generations were Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus, Anacreon, and Euripides.
Ancient Greece’s cultural explosion ended when it was conquered first by Alexander the Great and then by Rome. The Romans borrowed from Greek works to develop their own dramatic, literary, and poetic movements. As Greek works became disseminated through the Western world, they created the basis for modern literature.

Provencal literature (11th to 13th centuries)

Like a giant iron cloud, the popes of the Holy Roman Empire – the purveyors of the Middle Ages – clamped down and extinguished creative and artistic expression. However, as the 11th century reached its midpoint, a group of troubadour musicians in southern France began to sing and write striking lyrics. They were influenced by the Arabic civilization and its leading denizens, Omar Khayyam and Rumi, inspired by Latin and Greek poets, and guided by Christian precepts. Three concepts stood above all others: the spiritualization of passion, imagery, and secret love. With a gift for rhythm, meter, and form, the musicians and poets created a masterful style by the 13th century.

The Provencal troubadours began as court singer-poets, among them William X, Duke of Aquitaine, Eleanor Aquitaine, and King Richard I of England. They practiced the art, but its undisputed masters were Bertrand de Born, Arnaud Daniel, Guillame de Machant, Christine di Pisan, and Marie de France. During their heyday, these and other poets routinely traveled to communities to deliver poems, news, songs, and dramatic sketches in their masterful lyrical styles. Among those deeply influenced were Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Forms like the sestina, rondeau, triolet, canso, and ballata originated with the Provencal poets.

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The Inquisition doomed the Provencal movement in the 13th century, though a few poets continued to produce into the mid-14th century. Most troubadours fled to Spain and Italy, where two new movements flourished – including the Sicilian School.

 

Sicilian School (mid-13th to early 14th centuries)

Emboldened by the passionate poetics of the Provencal troubadours, a small group of Sicilian poets in the court of Frederick II turned verses of heartfelt love into the first spiritual heartbeat of the Renaissance – and the ancestral work that would explode in England during the Elizabethan and Shakespearean eras.

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Frederick II required poets to write about courtly love, and hundreds of beautiful canzone were written between 1230 and 1266.


In the twelfth century, Sicily integrated three distinct languages and cultural influences: Arabic, Byzantine Greek, and Latin. The small society was well read in both ancient Greek and Latin, and women were viewed more kindly and tenderly than in other medieval cultures. When Sicilian poets interacted with the Provencal troubadours, they found the perfect verse form for their utterances of the heart: lyric poetry.

Beginning with Cielo of Alcamo, the court poets developed a series of lyrical styles that used standard vernacular to make art of poetry. They were aided by Frederick II, who required poets to stick to one subject: courtly love. Between 1230 and 1266, court poets wrote hundreds of love poems. They worked with a beautiful derivative of canso, the canzone, which became the most popular verse form until Giacomo de Lentini further developed it into the sonnet. Besides writing sonnets, de Lentini continuously invented new words in what became a new language – Italian. Among the best-known poets were de Lentini, Pier delle Vigne, Renaldo d'Aquino, Giacomo Pugliese, and Mazzeo Ricco.

The Sicilian poets made several changes to Provencal structure, including the discontinuation of repetitive and interchangeable lines. They also wrote poetry to be read, rather than accompanied by music, and created the 14-line sonnet structure, broken into an octet and sestet, which stands to this day.
As the 14th century dawned, the Sicilian poets’ canzones, balladas and sonnets came to the attention of Dante and Petrarch, who spread them throughout Bologna, Florence, and other emerging literary centers. By the time the Renaissance arrived, nearly 100 poets were plying their trade throughout the culturally awakening country–and scholars from England, France, Spain, and Germany were watching.

Elizabethan and Shakespearean eras

By the time the Italian Renaissance waned, its greatest poetic exports–the ballad and the sonnet–found their way to England through Sir Thomas Wyatt. He introduced the forms to a countryside attuned to lyrical and narrative poetry by the great Geoffrey Chaucer, whose experiences with latter Provencal poets influenced the style credited with modernizing English literature.

Sonnets swept through late 16th and early 17th century England, primarily through the works of Wyatt, Sir Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Spenser and Shakespeare took the Petrarchan form that Wyatt introduced to the literary landscape and added their individual touches, forming the three principal sonnet styles: Petrarchan, Spenserian, and Shakespearean. The other fixed verse influence – Provencal and French forms – added to the poetic mix, creating a vast community of poets who recited their works in various forums. In the theater, their verse often preceded Shakespeare and Marlowe dramas – a practice followed nearly four centuries later by many of San Francisco’s 1960s rock musicians, who preceded their concerts with readings from Beat poets.

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The socially open Elizabethan era enabled poets to write about humanistic as well as religious subjects. The dramatic rise in academic study and literacy during the late 16th century created large audiences for the new poetry, which was also introduced into the educational system. In many ways, the Elizabethan era more closely resembled the expressionism of the Ancient Greeks than the Sicilian and Italian Renaissance schools from which it derived its base poetry.

Metaphysical poets

A century after the height of the Elizabethan era, a subtler, provocative lyric poetry movement crept through an English literary countryside that sought greater depth in its verse. The metaphysical poets defined and compared their subjects through nature, philosophy, love, and musings about the hereafter – a great departure from the primarily religious poetry that had immediately followed the wane of the Elizabethan era. Poets shared an interest in metaphysical subjects and practiced similar means of investigating them.

Beginning with John Dryden, the metaphysical movement was a loosely woven string of poetic works that continued through the often-bellicose 18th century, and concluded when William Blake bridged the gap between metaphysical and romantic poetry. The poets sought to minimize their place within the poem and to look beyond the obvious – a style that greatly informed American transcendentalism and the Romantics who followed. Among the greatest adherents were Samuel Cowley, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, George Chapman, Edward Herbert, and Katherine Philips.

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John Dryden epitomized the metaphysical movement, which looked beyond the obvious and minimized the author’s place within the poem.

Romantic poets

The third of England’s "big three" movements completed a three-century period during which the British Isles took the Western poetic mantle from Italy and molded the forms, styles, and poems that fill school classrooms to this day. The Romantic period, or Romanticism, is regarded as one of the greatest and most illustrious movements in literary history, which is all the more amazing considering that it primarily consisted of just seven poets and lasted approximately 25 years – from William Blake’s rise in the late 1790s to Lord Byron’s death in 1824.

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The Romantic movement lasted about 25 years, until Lord Byron’s death in 1824, and was one of the greatest movements in literary history.

In between, the group of poets lived as mighty flames of poetic production who were extinguished well before their time. The core group included Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a magnificent trio of friends: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. While history did not treat Robert Southey so kindly, Byron considered him a key member of the movement. Keats, who wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn," only lived to the age of 26. Shelley died at 30, while Byron succumbed at 36. They wrote together, traveled together–even renting a house at the base of Rome’s Spanish Steps–and commiserated with foreign writers, most notably the older Johann Wolfgang Goethe, whose genius and versatility they idolized.
Ironically, the poets held distinctly different religious beliefs and led divergent lifestyles. Blake was a Christian who followed the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenbourg (who also influenced Goethe). Wordsworth was a naturalist, Byron urbane, Keats a free spirit, Shelley an atheist, and Coleridge a card-carrying member of the Church of England.

The romantics made nature even more central to their work than the metaphysical poets, treating it as an elusive metaphor in their work. They sought a freer, more personal expression of passion, pathos, and personal feelings, and challenged their readers to open their minds and imaginations. Through their voluminous output, the romantics’ message was clear: life is centered in the heart, and the relationships we build with nature and others through our hearts defines our lives. They anticipated and planted the seeds for free verse, transcendentalism, the Beat movement, and countless other artistic, musical, and poetic expressions.

The Romantic movement would have likely extended further into the 19th century, but the premature deaths of the younger poets, followed in 1832 by the death of their elderly German admirer, Goethe, brought the period to an end.

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The Romantics felt that the relationships we build with nature and others defines our lives.

 

American Transcendentalists (1836-1860)

Of all the great communities and movements, the American Transcendentalists might be the first to have an intentional, chronicled starting date: September 8, 1836, when a group of prominent New England intellectuals led by poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson met at the Transcendental Club in Boston. They gathered to discuss Emerson’s essay, "Nature" and developed "The American Soul," which stated, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds ... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

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The Transcendentalist Movement began when New England intellectuals gathered to discuss Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, "Nature."

The Transcendentalists grew from that mission statement, which was inspired by Emerson’s love of Hinduism, Swedenbourg’s mystical Christianity, and Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. They created a shadow society that espoused utopian values, spiritual exploration, and full development of the arts. They revolted against a culture they thought was becoming too puritanical, and an educational system they thought overly intellectual. Like the Romantics, heart-centered, personal expression was their aim – and so was the development of socialized community. They even had a commune, Brook Farm. These sentiments informed their gatherings, discussions, public meetings, essays, and poetry. Unlike the Romantics, who often clashed because of their personal differences, the Transcendentalists sought commonalities, no doubt influenced by Emerson’s adherence to Hinduism.
A number of great authors, poets, artists, social leaders, and intellectuals called themselves Transcendentalists. They included Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, Sophia Peabody, and her husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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Many literary giants, including Louisa May Alcott, considered themselves Transcendentalists.

The Beat movement (1948-1963)

It only lasted 15 years and was known by the masses only in the last six, but the combination of disenfranchisement, wanderlust, and creative expression that inflicted a handful of New York and San Francisco students and young intellectuals resulted in the most influential movement of the past 100 years – the Beat movement.

The Beats formed from a wide variety of characters and interests, but were linked by a common thread: a desire to live life as they defined it. The mixture of academia, be-bop jazz, the liberating free verse of William Carlos Williams, and the influence of budding author Jack Kerouac (who coined the term "Beat Generation" in 1948 at a meeting with Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, and William S. Burroughs) inspired a young Ginsberg to change everything he’d learned about poetry. He wrote throughout the early 1950s in a narrative free verse, joined by the young Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, and the older Burroughs, who, like Kerouac, opted for fiction – though Kerouac wrote beautiful poetry that has been read and appreciated over the past two decades.

By the mid-1950s, the Beats’ mixture of free-expression jazz and socially informed free verse poetry became the anthem for a generation of Greenwich Village youth seeking greater spiritual meaning through visceral experiences and the laying down – or trampling – of their parents’ strict, Depression and World War II-fed mores.

In 1956, the scene exploded into the public eye when Ginsberg published Howl, followed a year later by Kerouac’s On The Road, which he’d been shopping to publishers since 1949. Ironically, the explosion was triggered not in New York, the center of early Beat poetry, but across the continent at San Francisco’s Six Gallery. On October 9, 1955, a group of Beat poets from both coasts gathered for what became the 20th century’s most famous single reading – but it was Ginsberg’s reading of Howl that left his peers gasping in amazement and that ignited a subculture.

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The Beat Movement entered the public’s consciousness when Allen Ginsberg published Howl.

By the time of the Six Gallery reading, San Francisco was host to a burgeoning Beat community that included poets Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip LaMantia, and three older influences: Kenneth Rexroth, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen. In 1947, Rexroth launched the San Francisco Renaissance, a loose poetic movement including he, Whalen, Kenneth Patchen, and William Everson. It directly fed the San Francisco Beats, as did the Black Mountain Poets that included Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Another major contributor was former New York poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who owned and operated City Lights bookstore, which in the 1950s sold books that were banned by the U.S. Justice Department. He published Howl, thus creating a legacy as the greatest publisher and distributor of Beat literature.

Beat poets and their works fostered a new era of appreciation and study of poetry. The emerging Baby Boomer generation fanned the fame of the Beats far beyond what any of them imagined. The Beats also influenced East Village poet-musicians Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg (who formed the Fugs), and a group of artistic, musically inclined youth who hung out in San Francisco’s North Beach and Haight-Ashbury districts. That group went on to launch psychedelic rock and the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. Growing fame also brought many fine Beat poets to the surface, such as Diane Di Prima, Joanne Kyger, LeRoi Jones, and Herbert Huncke, who worked in the shadows of their more renowned peers.

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In 1947, Kenneth Rexroth launched the San Francisco Renaissance, which fed into the San Francisco Beats.

 

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A poet’s struggle.

Ask any committed poet how he or she makes money, and you’ll receive one of two responses: "I don't" or "in many different ways." A poet’s struggle between making money and plying the art is ageless and intense, often leading to internal conflict over whether the work is too commercial or unreachable by the masses. Countless poets grapple with "the business of poetry" – a term that many consider an oxymoron.

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As a stand-alone art form, poetry is and has always been the least lucrative form of writing.

Constant promotion.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is the author of nine collections and creator-editor of the acclaimed Poetry 180 series for high school poetry studies. He has sold several hundred thousand copies of his various works, but he is also a longtime college professor in New York, and each year conducts dozens of readings, keynotes several writers’ conferences, and sits on the panels of others. All of these activities promote his poetry. Until Collins rose to prominence over the past ten years, these activities also helped to finance his work. As Mark Strand, another former U.S. Poet Laureate, noted in the 2007 Writer’s Market, "Nobody makes money from poetry unless they give lots of readings."

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Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins relied on a variety of promotional activities to finance his work.

Rewarding but not lucrative.

As a stand-alone art form, poetry is and has always been the least lucrative form of writing. The reasons are financial as well as artistic. Since the best Ancient Greek bards mixed music, poetry, teaching, and drama 2,500 years ago in order to justify the courtly lifestyles given them by the nation-state, poets in virtually all civilizations and cultures have resorted to creative multi-tasking to support their art and craft. Before Greece was conquered and united by Alexander the Great, each nation-state’s ruler employed a court poet, giving those few poets job security. Most of the others, including Sappho, Aeschylus, Pindar, and Euripides, either wrote plays or contributed their verse to plays, feeding the Ancient Greeks’ insatiable desire for theater. They also read publicly in special programs and forums. Greek theater was an ideal blend of dramatic, musical, and poetic arrangement, which, upon closer inspection, was both a financial and an artistic decision.

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Pindar (above), Sappho, Euripides, and other Ancient Greek poets had to find creative ways to support themselves while writing poetry.

The first bookstores.

Ancient Roman poets emulated their Greek predecessors and mixed music, drama, and verse while creating a large audience for Roman literature. The mercantile Romans also launched the first bookstores, stocking them with hand-printed scrolls or stone-carved tablets. Taking printed poetry beyond the private shelves of rulers and the wealthiest citizens, these stores enabled the general public to read verse and literature for the first time. The buyers of great libraries – such as Alexandria, Ephesus, and Constantinople – hoarded originals and quality copies, so merchants hired scribes to copy Roman and Greek manuscripts and fill the growing public thirst for written material. It was in the best interest of poets to be prolific, as they received percentages of sales, the first known "royalty" arrangement.

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Romans launched the first bookstores, stocking them with hand-printed scrolls or stone-carved tablets.

The demand for printed poetry – along with the bookstores, many libraries, and countless thousands of scrolls and tablets – went up in flames (literally) when Rome was sacked. The Holy Roman Empire took over and thrust Europe into the Dark Ages. For ten centuries, poetry became an oral tradition used to spread news beneath the ears and eyes of the Church; only in Persia did scribing continue, becoming an art form. The commerce of poetry skidded to a standstill, not to be revived until a confluence of social awakening, intellectual and creative pursuits, and technology changed the world.

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The demand for printed poetry literally went up in flames when Rome was sacked. (Heinrich Leutemann, The Sack of Rome, c. 1860)

 

A Renaissance, a printing press, and Shakespeare.

As the 15th century Italian Renaissance began to spread to England, France, and Spain, Germany’s Johann Gutenberg created a machine that could reproduce original manuscripts. Gutenberg’s press changed the course of history, but it was nearly another century before William Shakespeare facilitated the marriage between the printing press and poetry.

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Johann Gutenberg changed the course of history, but it was another century before Shakespeare brought together the printing press and poetry.

Shakespeare, who imbedded his sonnets and verse into theater to redefine drama in the Western world, was perhaps the first to make substantial amounts of money from poetry. As the popularity of verse spilled over to Elizabethan society, countless poets published broadsides – single sheets of paper printed on one side, sold for a pittance – of their sonnets, ballads, and other poems. After reading their works on stage or at public readings, poets sold and distributed their broadsides. Self-published poetry vaulted from the excruciating writing and copying of manuscripts to the formation of a business, fueled by printing presses sprouting up throughout England.

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During the Elizabethan era, many poets published and sold broadsides, single sheets of paper upon which poetry was printed.

Even five centuries ago, poets understood that simply writing, binding, and publishing poems was a sure road to poverty. Poets became orators, public readers, advisors to governments, academics, shameless promoters and distributors of their work, and writers for dramatists. All published their own work; some, like William Blake, moved printing presses into their homes to control the entire process. This was no small feat, as printing presses in the late 18th century were the size of small bedrooms and reached from floor to ceiling. By the 19th century, the road to achieving success in poetry looked much as it does now.

A glorious century of poetry – sort of.

The poets whose well-published and well-anthologized works populate classrooms at all academic levels lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Goethe, Blake, the Brownings, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, the Rossettis, and their peers. Because these poetic giants enjoyed larger audiences than today’s American poets (whose buying audience, Billy Collins estimates, is less than one-tenth of one percent of the population), the assumption is that they were well published and financially successful.

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With the exception of Goethe and Emerson (pictured above), 19th and early 20th century poets weren’t extensively published until after they died.


Goethe (who was also a novelist, essayist, scientist, and commentary writer) and Emerson (who was an essayist and commentary writer) were well published – until after they died.

They were all self-published and enjoyed degrees of failure or success commensurate with their ability to find audiences, and to promote and distribute their work. Keats, Shelley, and Byron didn’t live long enough to promote their published works. Some didn’t even get that far; the painfully shy and hermetic Emily Dickinson only lived to see five of her poems published. Whitman self-published many editions of his greatest work, Leaves of Grass, today the largest-selling poetry collection ever composed by an American-born author, but never saw the proceeds.

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William Carlos Williams, and other poets and artists gathered at his home, continued the legacy of the struggling poet.

By the early 20th century, the media reflected a skyrocketing appreciation for poetry. Hundreds of newspapers, as well as leading regional and national magazines, published poetry, paying both new and well-known writers for their submissions. Major book publishing houses also jumped into the act, offering poets royalty-only contracts.
Still, poets of the first half of the 20th century faced a daunting road, since hardcover poetry collections were expensive undertakings for both publishers and bookstores. Great poets like William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost continued the legacy of the struggling poet, plying their teaching, translation, and freelance writing skills to support their poetry. Williams had a distinct advantage, however: he was also a practicing physician.

 

The sea change of the 1950s.

A sea change emerged in the mid-1950s – and it wasn’t Beat poetry. Rather, it created a distributing arm for the Beat poets, a group who shared a passion for open form composition, worldly engagement, and spiritual understanding. New York-born poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind), then living in San Francisco, opened City Lights, the nation’s first paperback bookstore. A haven for poetry and controversial titles, City Lights stocked several books banned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and published titles that form the backbone of current poetic study – Allen Ginsberg’s Howl chief among them.

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In the mid-1950s, San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore was a haven for poetry and controversial titles.

Ferlinghetti scooped up the top Beat poets, all tireless readers and promoters of their work, and created the first contingent of poets who closely resembled published novelists. While the lives of the Beats continue to be celebrated, it was Ferlinghetti’s dual business decisions to open a paperback bookstore and become a publisher that launched the modern poetry era we know today.

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti took Beat poets like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, and Gregory Corso, and promoted their work.

The shaky marriage between the business and craft of poetry became more solid in the mid-1960s – again with Ferlinghetti at center stage. As the opening act to the band Jefferson Airplane, Ferlinghetti reprised a poet-musician-performing artist dynamic that dated back to outdoor amphitheaters in Ancient Greece. Soon, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Ginsberg, and others joined a symbiotic collaboration that proved to be smart business for the Beat poets.
Their influence on the scene changed from the decade-long flash in the pan that typified most poetry movements to the underpinning of a cultural revolution – with book sales, performances, readings, teaching gigs, and now DVD sets and CDs, to match.

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The business and craft of poetry merged when Beat poets performed opening acts for bands like Jefferson Airplane.

The poetry business today.

In many ways, today’s poet has more opportunities to make money from his or her work than anyone in the rich history of prosody. Myriad venues and mediums have expanded avenues of expression and potential revenue sources.

Inexpensive self-publishing or collaborative publishing ventures, along with print-on-demand publishing, enable poets to publish their collections with a minimal investment. Poets with established audiences and reputations can more easily contract with publishing houses, albeit with compensation that is pegged to sales volume.

Once published, enterprising poets can promote their work by posting poems on countless poetry websites and linking to their collections. They can also publish selected poems in one of the more than 2,000 American poetry magazines, anthologies, and journals, or an equally large number of web-based e-zines. In addition, blogs and sites like MySpace and Facebook give poets unprecedented and immediate access to a global audience. Poets can also create MP3 files or compact videos to post on personal web sites or YouTube, providing prospective buyers with clips of performed poems. Some poets have even produced mini-readings, offering 15 or 20 minutes of work on video that speaks to the poet’s voice, appearance, delivery, and the depth of their collection. Poets often affiliate or partner with other poets or poetry sites, providing visitors with opportunities to buy their works elsewhere.

Never before have poets been afforded a more diverse range of events and sites at which to read. A well-promoted (or self-promoted) poet can read at coffeehouses, libraries, universities, high schools, middle schools, poetry and writers’ conferences, poetry centers, retreats, salon-type gatherings at friends’ houses, and more. They read poems, sell books or spoken-word CDs, mingle with their current and future audiences, and increase their buyer base, one listener at a time.

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Never before have poets been afforded a more diverse range of events and sites at which to read.

Teaching gives poets yet another way to promote their work, earn a few dollars, and touch the lives of potential audiences. With educational programs running on shoestring budgets, many schools turn to working writers and poets to visit, teach – and sell their works to teachers and students. Poets with the ability to teach find work all across the academic spectrum, but also teach at learning centers, private workshops, and more.

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Poets with the ability to teach find work all across the academic spectrum.

Poets with musical talent are at a distinct advantage in today’s society, which is obsessed with popular music and downloadable tunes for MP3 players, iPods, computers, and cell phones. Musician-songwriters pen lyrics that they can publish and perform themselves using inexpensive computer-based studios and mixing boards, or provide to countless labels and artists looking for lyrics that stir the hearts of their fans.
Regardless of the promotional and distribution venues available, the business of poetry remains now as it has for three millennia – very hard work. Yet, poets have never written poems to make money. They write poems because something deep inside calls for expression, and they know there is only one thing to do – express it

 

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Originated by Giacomo de Lentino in the 13th century, the sonnet is the most universally known poetic form in the English language.
Although it was already well-practiced in Italy and England, the sonnet vaulted into the literary stratosphere when it became the vehicle of choice for William Shakespeare in his plays and poetic works. Perhaps Shakespeare was not the best sonnet writer, nor the most creative, but he was to poetry what Walt Disney was to animation. Shakespeare’s sonnets (154 of which have survived to this day) expanded opportunities for poets, academics, and students to bring poetry and drama more deeply into their lives.

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Shakespeare’s sonnets expanded opportunities for poets, academics, and students to bring poetry and drama more deeply into their lives.

The sonnet’s Italian origins.

The sonnet has been so pervasive among English poets for the past five centuries that it’s easy to forget that the romantic and balladic form’s origins are not English, but Italian (sonetto means "little song"). Sir Thomas Wyatt didn’t bring the form he learned from Francesco Petrarch back to the British Isles until some 300 years after early 13th century Sicilian wordsmith Giacomo da Lentini first put together two quatrains and two tercets for a romantic 14-line poem.

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The sonnet had already existed for 300 years when Sir Thomas Wyatt brought it to the English Isles. Portrait by Hans Holbein.

The form grew throughout medieval Italy, with lyric poets such as Dante Alighieri, Guido Guinicelli, and Guido Cavalcanti writing both physical and platonic love poems. Francesco Petrarch leapt forward by refining the form and writing Il Canzoniere, a book filled with sonnets of love and passion. Renaissance poets such as Michelangelo, Baldassare Castiglione, and Torquato Tasso wrote in Italy, while French poets Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Deportes, and Francois de Malherbe created that country’s first body of sonnets. Other innovators included 15th century Spanish poet Marques de Santillana and 16th century Garcilaso de la Vega, Portugal’s Franciso de Sa de Miranda and Antonio Ferreira, and Germany’s 17th century Georg Rudolf Weckherlin.

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Francesco Petrarch, who refined the form, filled Il Canzoniere with sonnets of love and passion.

An English love affair.

England fell most deeply in love with the sonnet. Wyatt’s import of the Petrarchan form of fourteen 10-syllable lines (abab cdcd efef gg) inspired sonnet sequences by Sir Philip Sydney (Astrophil and Stella), Samuel Daniel (Delia), Thomas Lodge (Phillis), Michael Drayton (Ideas Mirror), and many more.

In the 1590s, Sir Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare mastered the sonnet and changed its structure to suit their respective needs. By the time Spenser and Shakespeare became famous, the three most noteworthy sonnet structures were in place: the Petrarchan, Spenserian, and Shakespearean forms.

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Sir Edmund Spenser (above) and William Shakespeare mastered the sonnet in the 1590s.

Like today’s plethora of "me-too" animated movies, so many love sonnet sequences dominated the English literary landscape that, by the early 17th century, notable lyric poets of the Jacobean and Caroline periods moved on to different stanza lengths, syllable counts, and subjects. Ben Jonson and John Donne continued to write sonnets, with Donne’s 19 Holy Sonnets resurrecting religious themes that hadn’t been seen since 14th century Italy.

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John Donne’s 19 Holy Sonnets resurrected religious themes that hadn’t been seen since 14th century Italy.

 

Milton’s lone quest.

The sonnet’s next evolutionary breakthrough came in the mid-17th century from John Milton, who dispensed with love themes and wrote about events, people, and occasions. He also added a fourth twist to the structure, combining an eight-line stanza with an abbaabba rhyme scheme and a six-line stanza with a rhyme scheme he varied from poem to poem. Still, Milton was alone and adrift in the long-lasting ebb of the sonnet, and only a few 18th century poets, such as Thomas Gray, took up the cause.

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John Milton revolutionized the sonnet by writing about themes other than love and changing rhyme schemes from poem to poem. (Eugene Delacroix, Milton Dictates to His Daughters, c. 1826)

The sonnet’s revival.

Prolific Romanticists eventually came to the rescue and sought poetic influences from Ancient Greece forward. William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley led a full-throated revival of the sonnet, writing some of the English language’s greatest poems. When Lord Byron and Shelley traveled to Italy, they – along with leading writers like Ugo Foscolo and Giosue Carducci – ignited a revival in the form’s motherland. France responded with sonnet sequences from Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier. The English revival continued well into the 19th century, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti introducing female desire into sonnets.

The 20th century was equally ripe with sonneteers, thanks to turn-of-the-century purveyor Gerard Manley Hopkins. Memorable sonnets were written by America’s Robert Frost and Robert Lowell; England’s W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney and John Crowe Ransom; France’s Arthur Rimbaud; Germany’s Ranier Maria Rilke; Ireland’s Patrick Kavanagh; Wales’ Dylan Thomas; and Scotland’s Edwin Morgan.

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When Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron traveled to Italy, they ignited a revival of the sonnet. The Cimitero Acattolico in Rome is Shelley’s final resting place.

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The sonnet reigns supreme.

The sonnet reigns as the most popular and adaptable of poetic forms. No fewer than 20 variations of the 14-line form have been published since Salvatore di Giacomo first banded together two quatrains and two tercets. Some curtail to 10 lines (Curtal Sonnets), others expand to 16 lines, and still others close with half-lines. Many people find that the most enjoyable way to read the form is the Crown of Sonnets, consisting of seven sonnets in which the last line of one serves as the opening line of the next; John Donne’s Holy Sonnets is a prime example of this type of construction.

While there is a wide variety of sonnet adaptations, six variations are the most prominent: Petrarchan, Curtal, Spenserian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, and terza rima.


Petrarchan sonnet.

Francesco Petrarch refined the earliest Sicilian sonnet forms of two fused quatrains and two fused tercets into an ababcdcd-efefgg rhyme scheme, with 10 syllables per line, and defined sonnet writing for more than two centuries. Sir Thomas Wyatt brought it to England, but William Shakespeare shepherded the Petrarchan form into the limelight.


From Visions
Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374)
Being one day at my window all alone,

So manie strange things happened me to see,
As much as it grieveth me to thinke thereon.
At my right hand a hynde appear’d to mee,
So faire as mote the greatest god delite;
Two eager dogs did her pursue in chace.
Of which the one was blacke, the other white:
With deadly force so in their cruell race
They pincht the haunches of that gentle beast,

That at the last, and in short time, I spide,
Under a rocke, where she alas, opprest,
Fell to the ground, and there untimely dide.
Cruell death vanquishing so noble beautie
Oft makes me wayle so hard a desire.
(Trans. Edmund Spenser)


Sonnet
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Ye ladies, walking past me piteous-eyed,

Who is the lady that lies prostrate here?
Can this be even she my heart holds dear?
Nay, if it be so, speak, and nothing hide.
Her very aspect seems itself beside,
And all her features of such altered cheer
That to my thinking they do not appear
Hers who makes others seem beatified.
‘If thou forget to know our lady thus,

Whom grief o'ercomes, we wonder in no wise,
For also the same thing befalleth us,
Yet if thou watch the movement of her eyes,
Of her thou shalt be straightaway conscious.
O weep no more; thou art all wan with sighs.
(Trans. D.G. Rossetti)


Curtal sonnet.

The 10-line, two-stanza Curtal Sonnet actually pre-dated the Petrarchan form, but was only used by the more masterful structural poets. A good example is embedded within the 29 movements of Dante’s La Vita Nuova.


From La Vita Nuova
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
And now (for I must rid my name of ruth)

Behooves me speak the truth
Touching thy cruelty and wickedness:
Not that they be not known; but ne'ertheless
I would give hate more stress
With them that feed on love in every sooth.
Out of this world thou hast driven courtesy,

And virtue, dearly prized in womanhood;
And out of youth’s gay mood
The lovely lightness is quite gone through thee.
(Trans. D.G. Rossetti)


Spenserian sonnet.

The first poet known to modify Petarch’s form, Sir Edmund Spenser kept the structure but introduced an abab-bcbc-cdcd-ee rhyme scheme.


From Amoretti
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599)
What guile is this, that those her golden tresses

She doth attire under a net of gold;
And with sly skill so cunningly them dresses,
That which is gold or hair, may scarce be told?
Is it that men’s frail eyes, which gaze too bold,
She may entangle in that golden snare;
And being caught may craftily enfold
Their weaker hearts, which are not yet well aware?
Take heed therefore, mine eyes, how ye do stare
Henceforth too rashly on that guileful net,
In which if ever ye entrapped are,
Out of her bands ye by no means shall get.
Folly it were for any being free,
To covet fetters, though they golden be.


Shakespearean sonnet.

Shakespeare refined Petrarch’s form by blending the 14 lines together and, like Spenser, creating a less obvious division of lines. However, Shakespeare modified the rhyme scheme into abab-cdcd-efef-gg.


From Sonnets
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

To Fanny
John Keats (1795-1821)
I cry your mercy–pity–love!–aye, love!

Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmasked, and being seen–without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole,–all–all–be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss,–those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,–
Yourself–your soul–in pity give me all.
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life’s purposes,–the palate of my mind
Losing its gist, and my ambition blind!


Miltonic sonnet.

In an effort to bring the sonnet back into vogue after a half-century lull, John Milton used an 8-line/6-line format and simplified the rhyme scheme into abbaabba-cdcdcd, which many Romantic poets later adopted for their larger works.


To Cyriack Skinner (Milton’s pupil)
John Milton (1608-1674)
Cyriack, this three years’ day these eyes, though clear

To outward view, of blemish or of spot,
Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
Of sun or moon or star throughout the year,
Or man or woman. Yet I argue not
Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer

Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty’s defense, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world’s vain mask
Content, though blind, had I no better guide.


Terza rima sonnet.

Another original creation of Dante, the terza rima sonnet is a rare but superb form that blends four quatrains and a rhyming couplet with a terza rima rhyme scheme. The most noteworthy example is in one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous poems, "Ode to the West Wind."


Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1795-1825)
First Movement

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-striken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

 

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Free verse makes liberal use of line breaks, lack of rhyming, word choices, and lengths to create poems that reflect the writer’s deepest feelings and natural speech rhythms.

Poet Harvey Stanbrough (Beyond the Masks) likes to say of free verse, "There’s nothing truly free about it. All well-written free verse is metrically sound." Stanbrough’s view was echoed by former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, who said, "The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau."

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Former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall

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Expressionist poetry.

Free verse caught fire during America’s two great forays into expressionist poetry: the American Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century that included Henry David Thoreau and influenced Walt Whitman; and the Beatnik poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, when Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, aging Beat influencer William Carlos Williams, and others took center stage. Indeed, hundreds of high school teachers and college poetry professors can thank free verse – and the free-form, free-verse lyrics penned by 1960s folk and rock musicians – for piquing their students’ interests in writing poetic verse.

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Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg rode the second wave of expressionist poetry in the U.S.

When compared to other forms of poetry, free verse can feel liberating. Lines do not have specific syllable counts or rhyming patterns; stanzas are not bound by standard line counts. In fact, stanzas are not bound at all; many free verse poems feature single stanzas of a thousand words or more. The movement of free verse is more reliant on natural speech rhythms than on imposed patterns. As D.H. Lawrence wrote, poets can "get away from the stereotyped movements."

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Meter is still important in free verse, as illustrated in this poem by James Merrill.

Ancient roots.

While free verse seems modernistic, its roots go back to medieval alliterative verse and even to the Bible. The Bible’s "Song of Songs" is written in what we would now call free verse. Many of the earliest Ancient Greek poets wrote in lines unmeasured by syllables and beat while they were developing what would become lyric poetry. In later Ancient Greece and Rome, however, fixed forms such as the ode, epic, and a variety of measured lyric poetry ruled the literary land.

Modern interpretations.

The promise of irregular cadence continued to beckon unconventional and narrative poets, and began appearing as vers libre in the 19th century French poetry of Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kant. Germany’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also experimented with free verse. By the latter half of the century, Walt Whitman had mastered the form, and bards such as Christina Rosetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Baudelaire, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W.E. Henley were writing free verse. Still, it wasn’t until Richard Aldington used the term "free verse" in a 1915 anthology introduction that the form took an English name.

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By the latter part of the 19th century, Walt Whitman had mastered free verse.

Yet, as T.S. Eliot warned, "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job." While free verse is irregular, lyrical, and unmeasured by line counts and stanzas, metrical and rhythmic precision remain just as vital as in other poetic forms.



Natural patterns.

Because of its hidden discipline, free verse often surprises those who expect a verbal free-for-all. While line and stanza counts, syllables, and rhyme schemes may seem random, the beat of the poem is not; it’s a variation of natural speech patterns. Free verse maintains a metrical and rhythmic precision, exemplified by its first universally recognized master, Walt Whitman.


From After the Sea-Ship
Walt Whitman (1819-92)
After the Sea-Ship—after the whistling winds;
After the white-gray sails, taut to their spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad, myriad waves, hastening, lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship:
Waves of the ocean, bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
Waves, undulating waves—liquid, uneven, emulous waves,
Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,
Where the great Vessel, sailing and tacking, displaced the surface;
Larger and smaller waves, in the spread of the ocean, yearnfully flowing;
The wake of the Sea-Ship, after she passes—flashing and frolicsome, under the sun,
A motley procession, with many a fleck of foam, and many fragments,
Following the stately and rapid Ship—in the wake following.


From Marriage
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one’s mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one’s intention
to fulfill a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time,
this fire-gilt steel
alive with goldenness;
how bright it shows—


From Little Father

Li-Young Lee (1957- )
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
My little root who won’t drink milk,
Little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
Little clock spring newly wet
In the fire, little grape, parent to the future
Wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
Little father I ransom with my life.

 

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The ballad’s 4-3-4-3 line beat in matching quatrains has become the most familiar spoken-word and recorded poetic form of modern times.
Much of today’s literary and musical culture grows out of the ballad. Every day, we hear ballads on our radios, iPods and MP3 players, and as a backdrop for commercials. Over the past half century, rock and country music have given the ballad a format that appeals to baby boomers and Generations X, Y and Z – all of whom were exposed to the plot-driven poetry from grammar school through college.

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Ballads are the basis for much of the music we listen to everyday.


Steeped in Western culture.

Whether in traditional or lyrical form, the ballad has been omnipresent in Western culture for the past millennium. It has informed and presented tales to listeners and readers throughout the Western world with themes of religion, love, tragedy, and political propaganda. Its rhythmic, alternating 4-3-4-3 line beat per quatrain stanza presents one of literature’s most natural and musical tension-then-release cadences. Verse writers, storytellers, and musicians all instinctively know this most basic, essential form – as do millions of readers and listeners.

Medieval roots.

The ballad evolved and grew from several medieval roots, most notably Provencal folk music. The form had been known orally for centuries prior, with storytellers using the line breaks and rhythm to enrapture their audiences as they passed along tales and histories – many of them important to survival. Troubadour poets developed the cadence we know today, and then spread the sweet, lilting features of the ballade to Spain, post-Norman England, and Italy. Spanish court poets immediately seized on the form, producing beautiful works through the latter Middle Ages. Italians, particularly Tuscan song-poets, created a shorter version, the ballata.

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Medieval troubadours such as Bernart de Ventadorn developed the cadence of the ballad as we know it today.

The Renaissance ballata.

The ballata was a favorite form during the Renaissance, joining other lyrical expressions such as rispetto, madrigal, canzone, and the sonnet. Dante Alighieri, Guido Cavalcanti, and Giovanni Boccaccio found the ballata to be an even sweeter means to convey the love and passion that filled many of their works. Interestingly, the ballata flipped the envoi (the final lines), using it not as a tail-piece (like most English-language ballads), but as an introduction. While Dante wrote beautiful ballate, Boccaccio immortalized the form by having a storyteller sing a ballata in each of the ten main days (chapters) of The Decameron, as evidenced by a song imbedded in the eighth story of the ninth day:

A girl am I and gladly do rejoice
in the new season of the year,
Thanks be to Love and to my happy thoughts.
Through the green meadows do I go
to see the yellow flowers and the white and red,
the roses on their thorns and the white-flowers-deluce;
and I go likening them to the face of him
who loving me hath captured me,
even as she that doth desire
naught else save her delight.
(Translated by Richard Aldington)

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Boccaccio immortalized the form by having a storyteller sing a ballata in each chapter of The Decameron. (John William Waterhouse, Decameron, 1916)

By the 15th century, Geoffrey Chaucer began to fine-tune the structure of the ballata to create the modern ballad. Within a century, ballad broadsides written by so-called "pot poets," and shunned by artists who favored the more formal sonnet, spread across the English countryside and into the popular culture. In fact, the effectiveness of these broadsides (single sheets of paper upon which poetry was printed) inspired the pamphleteers who, two centuries later, helped America win its revolution against England.

A writer’s sport.

The ballad maintained a strong presence in England for three centuries. When the Romantic poets came along, they found a perfect form for their lilting verbal melodies, and turned the ballad into a writer’s sport. Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, and other Romanticists wrote numerous ballads, but it was the succeeding generation that immortalized the form. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is perhaps the most famous poetic ballad, while William Wordsworth and Thomas Percy also wrote extensively with the ballad form. With the arrival of the 20th century, William Butler Yeats became the foremost ballad writer in English poetry.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is arguably the most famous poetic ballad.

From words to music.

As the century progressed, English folk and American blues musicians found the ballad structure ideal for songs of the heart. They initiated a movement that eventually swept through country and rock music, making the ballad as popular in America and England now as it was six hundred years ago – only through music, not the spoken word.

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American blues musicians like B.B. King found the ballad structure ideal for songs of the heart.