24
PARTISAN REVIEW
one typical judgment: "Eliot and kindred reactionaries have evolved forms
that express their own restlessness and futility. The attempt to use their
technical devices for the expression of the revolutionary spirit inevitably
involves a fundamental contradiction, and the resulting poems are confused
and ineffective."
This approach to the literary heritage of American revolutionary
poets is more like a search for
Marxian
ancestors than a sound orientation
toward the critical reworking of the past. The very fact that most of
our poets have been influenced by the so-called "experimental reactionary
poets" shows either that most revolutionary verse is quite useless or that
the conception of this influence is incorrect. In the first place, the "rest·
lessness and futility" of Eliot is a form of revolt against existing society,
and therefore establishes a point of contact (usable elements) between him
and the revolutionary poets. Whatever it may be, this "restlessness and
futility" cannot possibly be private. And the new methods developed by
the experimental poets are not mere eccentricities, but the result of
the
assimilation of urban environments in poetry, reflecting the entire modem
sensibility. It's all very well to speak of fresh idioms and new rhythms,
but so far we have heard of no tangible suggestions as to the actual nature
of these rhythms and idioms. In a classic definition of "Leftism" Lenin
said that it "persists in the unconditional repudiation of old forms and
fails to see that the new content is breaking through all and sundry forms"
("Left"-Wing Communism).
Many of the forms of post-war poetry
are a case in point. Eliot has become a sort of bogeyman. But everyone
knows that it is not Eliot's recent ideology (his royalism, Anglo-cathol–
icism, etc.) which is influencing revolutionary poets, but the specific con–
tent of his earlier poetry, which was informed by a large degree of social
realism. Moreover, there is a real contradiction in labeling the methods
of the experimental poets as "technical devices"-if they were such, they
could be easily utilized without any danger of ideological pollution-and
then warning our poets against adopting these "technical devices." Post–
war poetry is certainly composed of much more than technical devices.
And these methods cannot be mere technical devices and weighty com·
ponents of bourgeois ideology at the same time.
There is no use whatsoever in talking about the usable past
if
we
assume beforehand that nothing is usable save that which is near-Marxian.
Tradition supplies us with a basis for formal criteria, with a source of
artistic training, and with currents of influence. These influences are not
always selected, we believe, on the basis of
general ideological kinship,
but
often on the basis of specific objectives which a revolutionary poet, for
example, sets for himself in any specific poem. When Alfred Hayes
was
writing a panoramic poem of New York,• he naturally turned to Crane
