Songs for the Millions, and other poems

These are poems written in blood and rage by a man who knew poverty firsthand. Benjamin Stott, Manchester bookbinder and Chartist, spent his days binding books for the wealthy and his nights writing verses that burned with righteous fury. The seventeen poems in "Songs for the Millions" confront the reader with the brutal mathematics of 19th-century industrial life: starvation wages, police truncheons, spy networks, and clergy who preached patience to the hungry. Stott saves his most savage lines for the priests who told workers to accept their suffering now for a reward later, calling their comfortable sermons what they were: lies dressed in scripture. But these are not merely complaints. They are battle cries for solidarity, poems designed to be read aloud in meeting halls and printed on flyers, intended to stir the millions into recognizing their collective strength. The miscellaneous poems that follow include his sprawling ode to the Independent Order of Oddfellows, a fraternal organization that offered mutual aid in a world that offered working men little. This is working-class poetry at its most urgent: art born from the belly of the beast, refusing to look away.