REVOLUTION AND
THE
INDIVIDUAL
WRITER
Horace Gregory
I suppose it is inevitable that my further discussion of Revolution and
the Individual Writer should be in the nature of a rebuttal to the essays
which followed my personal statement in
The New Masses.
I know that
superficially my "position" has in it glaring contradictions--questions which,
I think, are not merely personal but contain some relevance to all of us
concerned with bringing into being a new order of human
existenc~
in
America. As I see it the only way to answer these questions is to speak
of them frankly and I am grateful to Edwin Seaver and Meridel
Le
Sueur
for their willingness to present points of view that seem at variance with
mme.
Te central point of difference in these three preliminary discussions
arose over my use of the word "objectivity." I was the first to use the
word, a dangerous word in this connection, yet it expresses with greater
accuracy than any other the particular problem I had in mind. First of
all, let me eliminate the more obvious misunderstanding of my use of the
word. I don't mean politically "objective"; I don't mean that I belong
to the "Objectivist" school of poetry, which, after all, is merely an
ex–
tension of the "Imagist" Movement,
-n~w
long dead, into the nineteen
thirties. Nor do I mean that a writer can free himself of an emotional
bias. What I am trying to describe is something that my friend Louis
Grudin calls a "filter" through which a writer "sees" his world; it is
his "style," his "medium," and in my case, it happens to be a particular
kind of poetry.
Let us magine that the "filter" is actually a screen, something that
has a frame around it. Let us call that screen the writer's "medium" and
call the entire apparatus a "frame of reference." The living man has a
number of "frames of reference." These are neither separate, nor do they
coincid·e. When a man eats, he may be thinking of work he has to do.
He may solve a "problem" at the breakfast table. Should his think:ing
become too intense he will stop eating. The action may be reversed; if
the man is very hungry, he will be able to "think" of nothing but the
food that is placed before him. Either of these extremes is definitely ab–
normal. When a man can see no more than food before him he is either
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