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I
I
54
PARTISAN REVIEW
Lewis in the first paragraph of his essay: "In English poetry there havt
been several occasions on which the younger son, fretting against parental
authority, weary of routine work on the home farm, suspecting too that
the soil ne·eds a rest, has packed his bag and set out for a far country."
While his neighbors are sure that he must be going to pot in some strange
place, "his father smiles indulgently, feeling a secret pride, assured of the
vigour of his seed." Finally he returns, "not a broken prodigal" but a
worldly personage, with "many acres under cultivation."
In spite of their allegiance to Communism, Lewis and his contem·
poraries have not departed for a "far country." They seem incapable of
venturing away from their fathers' estate. Their work is encased in a
conventional pattern; they never seem to be able to get out of this tradi·
tiona! mold, although they try continually to grope their way beyond it.
Most of their labor seems to consist in closing the open. end of an old
tradition, rather than in forming a new one. They are not the pioneers of
a new poetry.
Perhaps their spirit of enterprise has been stifled by too much "ances–
tor worship," by being tied too securely to the apron strings of "parental
authority." Perhaps it is because they have not assimilated the manners
of their ancestors thoroughly enough to work out their own personal style.
More accurately, perhaps it is due to their assimilating "reactionary" as
well as "progressive" qualities of earlier poets. However, these seem to
be
very minor reasons. The matter is more fundamental than the mere
influence of certain poets upon others. It is connected with the entire
social direction and state of recent literature, as well as with the whole
movement of social forces at the present time. The newer English poets
have been unable to progress very far beyond their predecessors, not simply
because they have been affected by them, but because, like their ancestors,
they are hemmed in on all sides by social and cultural barriers which they
have been unable to break through.
This is illustrated by their attitude toward the problem of
com·
munication
(or, as it is more familiarly known, of
audience),
which is
the most crucial issue in modern poetry. 1 Lewis is, of course, greatly con·
cerned with this problem and comments upon it repeatedly in his critical
essay. In examining the work of Hopkins, he attributes its obscurity "not
to a clouded imagination or an unsettled intellect, but to lightning dashes
from image to image, so quick that we are unable at first to perceive the
points of contact." Eliot's obscurity, on the other hand, is "deliberate,"
caused by the running together of a series of images without logical con·
tinuity-in the same way a series of unconnected shots are run together
in a movie, in order to express the emotions of a character at a critical
moment. In addition to these devices, which are used in present-day
English verse, Lewis also points to the "search for methods of restoring
freshness to words" which is one of the chief reasons for the obscurity of
post-war poetry.
But the root cause, according to Lewis, is to be found in the develop–
ment of city life, which brings with it an "expansion of the Sl)cial unit to
a size at which it becomes impossible for the individual to have any real
contact with his fellows and thus to benefit from the group." "In the
face of this intolerable complexity," Lewis declares, "the sensitive in·
