Among the most likely candidates for belated recognition as the best American socialist poet of the 1930s is John Brooks Wheelwright, a rebel Boston Brahmin and heretical Christian who combined his experimental poetry with Marxist political activities. At the time of his premature death--at the age of forty-three he was struck down by a drunken driver--he was both an influential figure among Boston poets and a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party.

Much of Wheelwright's literary sensibility and outlook were shaped by the cultural history of New England, a region to which he was bonded by birth and upbringing. Some of his poems even drew sustenance from the works of rebels from the colonial and pre-Civil War eras. In fact, he was named after one of the leaders of the Antinomian Rebellion (1636-1638), the Reverend John Wheelwright (circa 1592-1679), from whom the poet was tenth in direct...