46
PARTISAN REVIEW
personal taste in literature, so obviously part of a particular, personal sen–
sibility, that their actual critical value is meagre.
It seems to me, that while Rolfe announced that he would discuss
certain "tendencies," he failed to do this and substituted instead a legend
of personal tastes and discipleships. It so happens that the majority of
the poets writing today have not been influenced primarily by Freeman,
Gold or Gregory. Perhaps they should have been. Perhaps it would
have been ideally better for them had they been, but as the case stands,
they have not.
Crane, Eliot, Pound, have been some of the more directly traceable
influences, but in general, it seems to me, it was not so much individual
poets and poetic methods that were taken over by the poets, as general
objectives and ambitions in the poetic atmosphere, charge, true, by the
bourgois poets of the preceding generation. This, includes, not only the
"masters," but the whole host of fugitive pieces which appeared in the little
magazines, forgotten poems that in their mass represented definite poetic
trends. This kinship with the past, I think, is traceable.
As far as I can see, and I have made, I confess, little effort to study
the problem, this influence may be divid·<:d into two general categories:
the technical mannerisms and the cultural mannerisms. The first has
produced different effects and results in different poets. In Maddow,
for example, I think we have evidence of a sincere effort to apply one
principle of poetic construction in greater degree than it has been done
before: a concentration of expression. Language, image, and event, in
Maddow's poems, are compressed under a pressure few poets have dared
to exert. The result, to me, has been a power of diction and an originality
of image that distinguishes him from the majority of younger poets writing
today. At the same time, I feel a lack of dramatic progression and a cer–
tain stylization of emotion which tends to make the poem unreal by giving
to the simplest kind of experience an intensity equal to th<: most complex.
In Fearing's poems, we have the development of a personal style and
a personal approach whose origins and germs, I think, one can find in
many poets of the twe'"nties. But where they have simply hinted at the
possibilities of using the popular ideals and slogans of the movietones and
the pulp magazines, Fearing has taken this as the core of his work. The
slang and idiom of our times, turned against itself, to reveal the defeat,
the cant, the frustration and hypocrisy at the heart of our civilization, has
been created into a gifted irony of high rank.
But while some have succeeded in transforming a mannerism into a
personal genuine manner, others have not.
The cultural mannerism, on the other hand, I think the far more
