some typed drafts, tend to be romantic, lyrical, full of the pain of lost or unrequited love, the anguish of loneliness, and the mysteries of nature, especially the winds and snows of the Nebraska winters. Several express deep love and affection for a female friend, and one describes a bond with her younger sister. Olsen says that there were other poems, now lost, on political themes like the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Mostly, though, these early poems are the effusions of an intense, imaginative young woman as influenced by the romantic traditions of nineteenth-century poetry and its twentieth-century practitioners like Millay as by the ''larger tradition of social concern."
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Olsen's decision to join the YCL in 1931 was a turning point; for the next year and a half she dedicated much of her energy to political work. She was sent from Omaha to Kansas City, where she attended the party school for several weeks, formed close ties to political comrades like the working-class women Fern Pierce and "Red" Allen, whom she helped to support by working in a tie factory, and became involved in an unhappy relationship with a party organizer. It was during this time that she was sent to the Argentine Jail for passing out leaflets to packing house workers. She was already sick at the time, having contracted pleurisy from working in front of an open window at the tie factory with a steam radiator in front of it; in jail, she became extremely ill and in 1932 was sent back to Omaha.
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During this time, her poems begin to acquire different subjects, a different quality. They still focus on personal experience and emotion, including the anguish of an abortion or miscarriage and the bitterness of misplaced or betrayed love. But now she sometimes interweaves political metaphors to express emotional states. One such poem begins with the speaker sitting "hunched by the window,/watching the snow trail down without lightness." The poem goes on:
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 | | The branches of trees writhe like wounded animals,
like small frightened bears the buds curve their backs to the
white onslaught,
and I think of what a Wobbly told me of his third degree,
no violent tortures, but exquisitely, civilized,
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