[The Revolutionary Imagination that is why so many…]

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The Revolutionary Imagination that is why so many people don't have enough to eat. But not to worry: Reagan to the rescue! The champion of free enterprise and the balanced budget has been trying to keep the farmers in check by paying them tens of billions of dollars not to produce food. In spite of his efforts, however, the granaries are still bursting at the seams, and that's a crisis.

The facts and figures are mind-boggling:

•" ...the government's farm support programs... cost $28 billion in the last fiscal year. This is about $3 billion more than all farm income, including direct government payments to farmers, and more than the government spent on welfare programs for the country's poor." (Emphasis added.)

• "The cost alone of direct payments and crop loans to farmers rose to $18.8 billion last year from $4 billion in the year President Reagan took office, a 470 percent increase in two years....

• These "incentives" succeeded in keeping 82 million acres of farmland idle.

• "At last count, there was enough grain in government-finan ced stockpiles to make more than two tons of cereal for every American family. There was enough cheese, butter and dried milk Paul Siegel is a retired professor of English literature. He is the author of several books on Shakespeare and literary criticism.

The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan, by Alan Wald. Chapel Hill, 288pp., $28.00 Alan Wald's The Revolutionary Imagination is the dual biography of two poets, John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan, both of whom joined the Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s. Wheelwright continued to be active in the SWP until his death in 1940, and Mangan was a member of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International when he died in 1961.

Wheelwright was a Boston upper-class rebel who, convinced of the decadence of capitalist society, became a socialist. He participated in demonstrations, soapboxed, and ran for office. With George Novack and other intellectuals he was active in the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky at the time of the Moscow trials.

A colorful and eccentric personality, Wheelwright was a legend in literary circles. When Muriel Rukeyser first met T.S. Eliot, he immediately regaled her with an anecdote of how Wheelwright had come to address a socialist rally wearing a raccoon coat and a bowler hat. When he doffed these, he was found to be clad in formal evening clothes.

Matthew Josephson stated, however, that intimates of Wheelwright realized 12 Socialist Action February 1984 stored by the government to put more than 40 pounds of dairy products in every kitchen in the country.... The stockpiles in August were four times the estimated food assistance needs of the world's hungriest nations."

• Reagan's "payment in kind" (PIK) program gave 66 million metric tons of grain to farmers who would agree to leave part of their land idle. About half of that "would have been enough to raise the average calorie consumption of the 67 poorest nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East this fiscal year to minimum standards," said a that "his affectations of dress or manner were only of the surface, a comedy he liked to carry on. The man within was forthright and had a strength and courage for life on his own terms." His comrades in the SWP saw him as a serious revolutionist despite his eccentricities.

BOOK REVIEW During the months before his death as the result of having been run down by a drunken driver, he was at the peak of his achievement and perhaps happier than he had ever been in his life. His book of poems, Political-Self Portrait, had been well received, another collection was almost finished, and still another collection was to be chosen and introduced by the esteemed critic R.P. Blackmur.

At a time when many radical intellectuals were turning away from radicalism as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Wheelwright was firm in his political commitment. He wrote Marya Zaturenska, the co-author of History of American Poetry, "More and more clearly the only answer appears to be world revolution."

Highly regarded in his day by fellow poets and critics, Wheelwright fell into obscurity after his death. However, in the last decade his reputation has grown.

New Directions press published his Collected Poems in 1972, and it was acclaimed in leading literary magazines. The poet John Ashbery stated in the New York Times Book Review that it recent study by the Economic Research Service."

What is the meaning of these incredible statistics? First of all, the productive capacity of American agriculture is so immense that even Reagan's extreme efforts have been unable, as one writer put it, "to hold back the flood of overproduction on America farms." Reagan's PIK program "could not deal with...our huge excess capacity for crop production. " (John A. Schnittker, New York Times, December 4, 1983)

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Sherry Mangan was one of the hundred most important books of western literature published since World War II.

Mangan came from an Irish-American middle-class family with intellectual interests. A poet, novelist, and shortstory writer, he was regarded as a young man of great literary promise in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Radicalized like Wheelwright, his friend and fellow member of the Harvard Poetry Society, Mangan refashioned his life. He became a foreign correspondent for Time and Fortune magazines, where he was respected for his insightful political analysis but held