POETRY
49
surpnsmg, therefore, that Rolfe's article misses the one, glaring failure
from which nearly all of the fertile poets suffer: failure to control poetic
form. His omission is the concomitant of his belief that there isn't enough
revolutionary verse being written. But as a matter of fact there is a great
deal being written-and most of it by the very poets whose failings in
form permit them to turn out poem after poem most of them sagging with
weary passages, tottering under the weight of lines which any self-criticism
execrates at once-until the total number of square inches of verse stretches
to mad proportions.
I believe that the worthlessness of much of our verse-its flaccid pas–
sages and too-frequent dreariness--can be traced to this special overpro–
duction. And this overproduction of mediocre work: arises from two
things: ( 1) most of our younger poets are crippled by influences. Their
poems are often rigged into devices which fail to hide the fact that they
are mutilations pieced together out of Hart Crane, MacLeish, Horace
Gregory, Pound, etc. (2) Many of our fertile poets either eschew self–
criticism or lack the ability to revise. The consequent formlessness is ruining
most of .the work of such talents as Hayes', Rolfe's and Muriel Ruk:eyser's.
Despite the proprietary use of the "we" in Rolfe's article, it is from
other writers that we have so far gained the bulk: of our best verse.
Fearing, Kalar, Charles Henry Newman, etc., may appear sterile alongside
the school of fecundity; but there is no reason to believe they are thereby
less important, or that their powers are drying up. Revolutionary poetry
does not depend on work published during a given calendar-interval: it
depends on the totality of each individual poet's work and the totality of
their combined product ... totality not in number of lines but in percep–
tive precision, inevitability of form, emotional power-memorableness.
No speculation on our poetry can be considered anything but arbitrary
if it omits the whole configuration of revolutionary strains rising in all
sections of the country. The Negro poets--Langston Hughes, Richard
Wright; H. · H. Lewis, Don West; Kenneth Patchen, Willard Maas,
James Daly and a dozen more. Out of the mjSS of young poets there
is none whose achievement lifts him perceptibly above the rest. Much
more reasonable, is the belief that our poetry will not be the product of
one or two writers of consummate power but ·rather of a score of smaller
poets--poets who in one or two poems catch and fix memorably the stuff
of poetry, failing in their other attempts. We may find that our poetry
will not produce one or two towering books but a fat anthology enclosing
the rich, various strains of a collective work. Some contributions to this
anthology have already been made, by Fearing, Gold, Kalar, Schneider, etc.
We will continue to need the corrective needed right now: not necessarily
a greater quantity of verse, but fewer and better poems.
