Between 1920 and his death in 1933, Harry Alan Potamkin wrote poems for literary magazines, workers' newspapers and Black newspapers. He was first inspired by the example of modernist poets, and as America changed in the days of the Great Depression, so too did Potamkin's poems, striking an uneasy balance between social vision and aesthetic experimentation. Potamkin's poems fused elegy, outrage and reportage with the concerns of the ancients. In the Embryo of All Things is the first collection of Harry Alan Potamkin's poems. This volume gathers his complete poems, including a speculative arrangement of his unfinished Spectacle Negre and his lyrics for children's songs written for the Pioneers, a Communist youth organization.