CRITICISM
19
instrument of reorienting social values, attitudes and sympathies. Many a
reader asks, "Well, does this poem make me want to go out and do some–
thing about it?" In asking such a question, however, the reader assumes
that poetry can undertake all the tasks of political education. At most a
poem usually helps to crystallize latent urges to action stimulated by a
variety of other influences, such as one's economic position, one's friends,
one's reading in politics and sociology, and some actual situation in the
class
struggle one ertcounters.
If
the poem's effect is isolated from
these other factors, a burden it cannot bear is placed on literature.
Such a consideration of art as a weapon remains abstract, of course,
unless it is seen in relation to some concrete audience. Whereas a novel
like Rollins'
The Shadow Before
reaches but a few thousand readers in
this country, in pre-Hitler Germany it would undoubtedly have reached
many times that number. Hence the kind of weapon literature is depends
to a great extent on the audience historical conditions have produced
for it in any given country. Moreover, with the education that ensues
from the radicalization of workers, a novel of the type we have mentioned
acquires more and more readers; and, in fact, the very existence of such
novels is a factor in the educative process.
The kernel of the problem comes into view, however, when someone
asks:
"If
the working class is still unable to grasp modern literary forms,
such as used by Waldo Frank, Dos Passos, Cantwell, Rollins, or poets like
Schneider and Fearing, is it not possible to develop simpler forms that will
carry the same content?" This question can be- answered by summarizing the
various points we have made. The new content of revolutionary writing has
already introduced greater simplicity. No revolutionary poet has the
formal complexities of Cummings, Crane or Pound. And
In
the future
further simplification may be expected. The reason for it is not that the
poet consciously set out to differ from Pound, for example, on the score
of greater simplicity, but that the very associations and emotions he deals
with are more concrete and have greater reference in the lives of most
people. An abstract demand for simplification ignores the fact that great
literature grows out of the highest level of a contemporary
cultut~.
So
long as capitalism controls the main organs of education, the values of
such literature will come into conflict with the mental habits of untrained
readers. But the growth of the revolutionary movement, in break–
ing these mental habits, is constantly extending its audience.
3:
Merit as ideology and merit as form.
Whenever critics ask
whether a reactionary poet could write a great poem, or whether we can
use traditional literary methods, or how we judge books of a seemingly
neutral subject-matter, they are really approaching the problem of the
relation of the merit of a work as ideology to its merit as form. This
