BOOKS
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dividual feels compelled to retire upon himself, to create artificially for
himself a world of manageable proportions." The poet must, first of all,
find a "point from which he may begin to work outward again." In this
process he is "bound to be obscure, for he is talking to himself and to his
friends-to that tiny, temporarily isolated unit with which communication
is possible, with whom he can take a certain number of things for granted."
This is what Lewis and his school have tried to do; they have at–
tempted to form a "compact working social group," made up of themselves,
with a set of subjective symbols (not only ideas and attitudes but steno–
graphic word-signs like
kestrel, railhead, pylons)
intelligible largely to
themselves.
Obviously this is no solution. It is a complete rout, a method at
widening the gap between the poet and his audience instead of bringing
them closer together. It shows that their work is being pushed in the same
direction as their apcestors-by the same social factors which have driven
bourgeois poetry deeper and deeper into the blind• alley of obscurity, as
well as by the
internal
development of poetry itself, that is, by the wearing
out of familiar modes of poetic expression. Lacking the social background
or the immersion in revolutionary activity that might help them to re–
establish contact with a wide audience, and lacking also the imaginative
intensity and magnitude that might help them to solve the internal troubles
of modern verse, they flutter helplessly against the walls in. which con–
ventional poetry is still encased, unable to break out into the open. In
setting up a narrow clique (even though it is to act only as a temporary
expedient, as a means of later "working outward again"), they are re–
treating from the problem they want to solve. Some of the American
proletarian poets, who have grown up within the Communist movement
or have spent their lives in the workingclass, have been more successful–
exactly because they have been a part of the workingclass, a part of the
feelings and experiences of the masses-in coping with this formidable
matter. For them the ·revolutionary movement is becoming what the
English poets yearn for-a homogeneous social unit with a "widely ac–
cepted system of morals" and a "clearly defined circumference of imagina–
tion."
In saying this I am not trying to preach, to assure the English poets
that immersion in the waters of revolutionary activity will cleanse them
of all sin.
It
is doubtful whether they could effect such a change when
one considers the nature of their li ves and experiences. It is even doubtful
whether their actual participation in revolutionary work would solve their
difficulties-at least not until they had undergone a long process of re–
education, of re-making. What I have been trying to do is not to evaluate
the way they write or to condemn. them for not writing in a different way;
I
have only been trying to say that they are working along the same path
as their predecessors, that they seem no more likely to solve the contem–
porary problem of communication than their ancestors.
This is not an intrinsic criticism of their verse, any more than blaming
Thomas Gray for not being a Romanticist would be a legitimate comment
on his poetry.
It
is, however,
a
criticism of what they have not been able
to do but apparently think they are doing.
Within the limitations of their vision, they are very skillful poets.
