POETRY
43
DISCUSSION
lsidor
Schneider:
Influences:
I am puzzled by the omission of E. E. Cummings in the
list
of influencing poets. Kreymborg and Bodenheim also had more in–
ftuence on the course of the contemporary poets than the article would
indicate.
Poets:
The work of H. H. Lewis has a decided place in revolution–
ary
poetry. He is spontaneous, his range is common experience and he has
an
unusual talent for literary invective.
Status of Poetry:
This may have been omitted from the discussion
because it would require extensive treatment and another article-the ques–
tion why, with the development of bourgeois power prose displaced poetry
as
the major literary vehicle. My feeling is that poetry is essentially a
social art. Much of it is associated with expression in public, with choral
singing, drama, declamation. The use of poetry in agitation is already
frequent in the socially-orientated revolutionary movement. In poetic
drama, and in poetic narrative characters tend to be social symbols. Prose,
on the other hand, which can more readily be enjoyed by the individual
reader, worked out better for the expression of bourgeois individualism.
The novel with its isolation of the hero was the mirror of the individual.
The poets, forced to write prose, have given poetic qualities and moods
to much of prose. Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, George Meredith, Emily
Bronte are examples. The universality of certain novels is often the sym–
bolism of the poet breaking through. On the other hand, poetry trying
to imitate and go beyond prose in the race to express individualism, often
succeeded in recent times in falsifying its function. By all this I do not
mean to infer that prose will not be a social art; I am convinced that it
will. But I want to indicate that poetry, by its very structure, has been
and will again be a social art and that the present disbalance between
poetry and prose will be corrected in a society of socialized individuals.
Problem of Audience:
The difference between the bourgeois audience
and the proletarian audience, the bourgeois response and the proletarian
response should be emphasized. The bourgeoisie wants to be distracted,
the proletariat instructed and inspired. In the bourgeois audience-poet
relationship the poet feels no responsibility except to his own artistic con–
science, and usually despises his audience; the auditor feels no responsibility
at all and looks at the author as a paid performer. The relationship has
the impersonality and even hostility of the commercial transaction. In
the proletarian audience-poet relation the responsibility of the poet is to
his artistic conscience, to his audience and to his sense of their union, and
