Poetry about Sacco and Vanzetti

The trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti moved many, including the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and novelist John Dos Passos, to express their sense of outrage at the injustice done to these men in verse. A number of these poems were collected by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney and published in 1928 as America Arraigned! This slim volume included poems penned either during the seven years the two men spent behind bars or in the months after their "judicial murders." All the poems selected, with the exception of one, are taken from America Arraigned! We've limited our selections to those written either on the day the executions or soon after. And while Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem, "Justice Denied in Massachusetts", also appeared in the Trent and Cheyney collection, the version reproduced here is from The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems, where it first appeared in book form. To see our selection of poems click here.