James Hartness Griffes — Collected Poems

James Hartness Griffes wrote meditative quatrains under his own name and militant reform poems as Luke North. Rubaiyat of Cheerfulness and Rubaiyat of Life compress their arguments into linked stanzas; Songs of the Great Adventure breaks open into free verse, antiwar writing, attacks on capital punishment, land-reform argument, labor songs, and sharp little prose-poems. Griffes moved out of Chicago reform circles connected with Clarence Darrow and carried Georgist politics into California. This edition brings the three poetry books together and keeps their sequences intact, so the distance between philosophical counsel and public agitation can be read as one developing project.