48
PARTISAN REVIEW
Robinson, Masters are seen as one not because their work carries a funda·
mental all-subsuming kinship but because they happen to be producing
little new poetry during a specified calendar-period. Amy Lowell, Elinor
Wylie and Vache! Lindsay-a curious menage
a
trois--are compelled to
reside in a common grave because they are dead. In his approach to cur·
rent revolutionary poets Rolfe uses the same time-lens; only this time its
diaphragm blacks out all poets except those who " are continually produc·
tive" during the current twelve-month or so.
Such a primarily fiscal view of creative produce is a peril to our
literature as a whole. Not only is its use of a time-gauge obviously un·
Marxian: its method is predicated upon a basic misrepresentation of the
creative process. Particularly is such a time-view impossible when ap–
proaching current revolutionary verse-a movement which did not sud·
denly spring from the calendar at a certain year in the third decade of the
current century but grew out of roots interwoven deeply in the whole
organism of American literature.
If
it did not result in bizarre distortions this method would not
be
worth examining. The unhealthy tone of the article as a whole might dis·
courage serious reading; but one may at least choose to believe that its
offensiveness is not conscious but the logical outgrowth of his method.
Let us take a single example. Alfred Kreymborg is brushed aside entirely
except for his
America, America
which, we are told , is "a much overrated
piece of verse." This reminds one of the late-lamented review of Kreym·
borg's
The Little World
in which Herman Spector urged the poet to
attend the Workers' School, for both critics ignore the totality of Kreym·
borg's work which has carried a deep proletarian strain for a full twenty
years. Out of the literal confusion of many elements, Kreymborg has
gradually neared a clear revolutionary position;
America, A mcrica
is the
latest stage in this leftward movement. And how on earth does Rolfe
know that Kreymborg has not written a hundred poems like
America,
America
during the last year-poems which may have been offered and
rejected or merely kept unpublished-poems which continue his proletarian
evolution? Can a Marxist critic dare to lop off a given year in a writer's
career and judge thereby the writer's potential fertility? Has this even
the remotest connection to a dialectical method? And how would Rolfe
explain the contradiction in his characterization of
America, America-a
"much overrated piece of verse" which has caught fire with revolutionary
dramatic groups all over the country, which has had an influence on poetry
and theatre-audiences exerted by no other
pi~ce
of verse in our period?
Rolfe's fiscal view of our poetry forces him into a general distortion
of the situation, for one cannot even begin to understand revolutionary
literature except as a totality over a considerable period of time. It is not
