to get his poetry published; he didn't believe in politics, he believed in poetry". As a Jew, a pacifist, and an anti-fascist, Fearing was uncomfortable with the American Communist Party's support of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. (As a child, Fearing witnessed the "reflexive anti-semitism" of his father towards his wife's family.) The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact prompted him to write a poem, "Pact", which was published in the New Yorker that year and contained hints to his allies that he was breaking rank. Wald writes that Fearing had "a mistrust of all political premises and a disbelief in all ameliorative options, [which] ran contrary to any connection with a large organization that demanded ideological conformity and an activist commitment". In the era of McCarthyism his political associations were sufficient for him to be interviewed by the FBI and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The FBI reported that "[Fearing said] he had become a 'fellow traveler' in 1933, and that prior to that time he had not been very interested in the meetings of the John Reed Club due to the fact that he was not interested in the politics discussed at all the meetings." Before the Committee in 1950, when asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, Fearing replied, "Not yet." Legacy The literary critic Macha Rosenthal called Fearing "the chief poet of the American Depression". He influenced the Beat poets, such as Allen Ginsberg. Alan Filreis writes that Fearing's "demotic, chatty, antic, digressive style made Ginsberg possible", and Fearing's contemporary Marya Zaturenska said of Ginsberg, "isn't 3/4 of him straight out of Kenneth Fearing?" Since Fearing's death, critics have offered more positive appraisals of his later poetry. In a 1970 article on the "Dynamo" school of poets, Estelle Novak wrote, "Fearing's true appeal as a revolutionary poet was his ability to combine realistic description and political comment in the form of a readable poem that lost nothing of its quality as poem while it gained in propaganda value." By the 1990s there was a "minor revival", with the National Poetry Foundation's publication of Kenneth Fearing Complete Poems in 1994, and the poet Mark Halliday published an essay, "Damned Good Poet: Kenneth Fearing" (2001), which included an analysis of the poet's themes. A selection of Fearing's poems has been published as part of the Library of America's American Poets Project. Bibliography Poetry Angel Arms, Coward McCann