Proletarian Short Poetry : The Class Struggle in the Poems of Carlos Gutiérrez Cruz and Tsuru Akira

In the present article I compare the use of proletarian themes featured in the short-form poems composed by Mexican poet Carlos Gutiérrez Cruz (1897-1930), and Japanese poet Tsuru Akira (1908-1938). Both poets worked at a time period when proletarian poetry became a trend due to several socio-political changes around the world. A comparative study of these poets shows that while Cruz and Tsuru shared similar views on politics and art, they worked in different poetic genres, styles, and used different techniques to convey their ideologies. The purpose of this article is to show the variety of proletarian short poetry written in different languages and contexts, its possibilities and capacity of adaptation as propaganda for the masses due to their simple, approachable language, brevity and closeness to political slogans. This paper concludes that Tsuru saw in senryū an ideal poetic form for conveying propaganda and the plight of the laborers. For Tsuru, senryū should express the class struggle in life while being accessible, brief and simple for the masses. Gutiérrez Cruz believed that art should serve a social purpose and composed proletarian poems in haiku and free verse, while maintaining that poetry should be understandable for the masses and that any form of art should be used as propaganda to expose class struggle.