54
PARTISAN REVIEW
a new idiom adequate to the revolutionary experience beyond the horizon
of Eliot's verse.
The actual literary achievement of the lost generation is far less than
the noise and drama which attended it. It probably did produce, as
Cowley says, more writers of talent than any preceding one in America.
But no single figure ha.> loomed large enough to persist as a strong
literary influence. In most specific instances, their methods are linked
too closely with subjects and ideas which we have long repudiated. But
the fact remains that a good part of their sensibility has entered into .our
approach to literature. Detailed anlysis would be beyond the scope of this
essay; but two examples might suffice. Hart Crane's use of the industrial
symbol and the sea symbol stem from a desire to unify what wad to Crane
the splintered fragments of modern life. In his verse this resulted in
a concentration of machine-imagery and sea-imagery which gaye it the
quality of fore-shortened symbolism. The method of Crase could not
lend itself to a revolutionary mood or incident. It is too jagged, too
steep, too autonomous. Yet Crane was much closer to industrial patterns
and rhythms of today than was Frost or Robinson or Jeffers. Hence
Crane's sensibility is more likely to be part of our sense of poetic line
and image, and of the quality of events, than is that of the older poets.
Similarly, the criticism of Eliot, Burke, Cowley, for example, is essen–
tially a reaction to the impressionistic criticism of preceding periods.
Their essays on literature strive for objectivity (as opposed to gush), for
specifically literary values, and for a scientific relation of literary to
philosophical and other non-literary ideas. They have not succeeded;
often these aims are no more than a pretense skillfully camouflaged with
fine writing. And, for the most part, (with the exception of some of
the recent work of those who have accepted Marxism), their premises
are false. Nevertheless, they have left us with some impressive judgments
and some good writing. But' what is more important, these aims which
they have not · realized have been adapted to our own critical standards.
Within the confines of our class position, we feel {hat our Marxian as–
sumptions equip us gradually to effect these aims in our criticism.
In a very concrete sense the Marxian idea of synthesis is here exem–
plified. The lost generation negated many of the values of the preceding
one, though both operated in the same framework of capitalist culture.
In rejecting this culture the proletarian generation effects a higher syn–
thesis of both earlier periods. (Though, of course, our range of assinu–
lation is by no means limited to the immediately preceding literary epochs.)
