POETRY
47
dangerous one. It expresses itself in those poets who have suddenly begun
to shout "tradition! tradition!"
They appear to have become aware suddenly of five centuries of
English verse and the enormity of the discovery threatens to overwhelm
them. They wrap themselves in the togas of a classical scholarship, begin
to bristle with Roman references, and evolve long epics on the spirit of
man marching toward a nebulous but brightly shining dawn.
They even threaten to outdo the Chinese in their hunt for "ancestors,"
literary and cultural ghosts who are called upon to support a feeble
rhetoric .
They threaten to become like the woman whose husband died and
went to Heaven, where, lonely, he pleaded with the Deity to haul the
wife up too. The Deity consented, the angel descended to earth, but the
wife demurred. On earth, she had a house and although it was weather–
beaten and old she was attached to it. She had a pig-sty and although
the pigs were scrawny and the trough smelled up the country-side, she
was fond of it. She had a bit of ground and although it was barren, she
was used to walking it. She would go to Heaven, the wise said, only if
the house and the pig-sty and the ground went with her. So the angel
transported all. And then the wife was happy in Heaven, for it was
like the earth she had always known, as vile, as old, as barren, as ever.
I would like to see a different Heaven, new, free and confident, where
all the revolutionary poets would sit and sing with untraditional angels.
Stanley Burnshaw:
Rolfe's attempt to straighten up the house of poetry has brought more
confusion than order. His comment on the poets of the still-born 1912
renascence are misleading because they derive from his hasty telescoping
of essentially disparate strains. This method, which involves so many
central omissions that distinctions are blurred, succeeds only in vulgarizing.
For example, to lump Frost with the Benets, Sandburg with Robinson is
to misrepresent the individual significance of these poets in a manner which
destroys meaning. And the strong, clear proletarian strain underlying
much of Sandburg's work-how is it related to the last-stronghold-of–
New-England anarchic mysticism of Robert Frost? To group poets to–
gether because their fertile period is over is a mechanical device entitled to
no place in a critique presuming to order the disparate strains in a body of
work which marked a sure gain beyond the poetic junk-standard of the
1890-1910s.
The source of Rolfe's difficulty, it seems to me, lies in the time-lens
through which he looks at his material. Thus, Sandburg, Frost, the Benets,
