This is imitative, scientific thinking,
and as such already
"dates".
Miss Rukeyser, in common with other left-wing poets,
condemns parents and that generation which gave us the heri-
tage of a capitalist-directed war and other social crimes. No
one has expressed this attitude more bitterly than Auden,
whe says of the "perfect Pater and marvelous Mater"-
When we asked the way to Heaven, these 'directed us ahead
to the padded room, the clinic, and the hangman's little shed.
Miss Rukeyser tends to soften her indictment:
We focus on our times, destroying you, fathers
in the long ground: you have given strange birth
to us who turn against you in our blood
needing to move in our integrity, accomplices
of life in rroolution, though the past
be sweet with your tall shadJaws
This repudiation of romantic blood-ties, and the setting up
instead as parents (ancestors) the poets, statesmen and sci-
entists who throughout history have been rebels against the
status quo,
envisionaries of a brotherhood of man, may be
ruthless. But it is courageous and necessary in view of the
social ideal yet to be attained. On this step which our younger
poets have taken, if on none other, can be founded a hope
for the future of poetry.
RUTH LECHLITNER
BEFORE THE BRAVE,
by Kenneth Patchen. Random
House. $2.00.
Whatever its qualities, the appearance of a new volume of
left-wing verse is a welcome· occasion for poetry as a whole.
Poetry in America will become, increasingly,
poetry com-
posed of the images reflected by the social revolution. Every
book that falls now into this course of development contri-
butes, its failures and defects included, at least as much
as the finished mirror-mysteries of yesterday's verse. Patchen's
book, like Fearing's, Rolfe's, Rukeyser's, is important as an
event and should be read.
Patchen writes what is known-in contradistinction,
I
suppose, to the unilinear narrative, emotional or moral theme-
development of the academicians-as
abstract poetry. Ideas
and data come flying into focus from any~'!le;c..
F;;:;:;i
even
from the requirements of qualitative unity or "mood"-
which Fearing retains as an effective principle of organiza-
tion-Patchen's
poems are open to augmentation at any
given point. All objective laws of fo:rm being thus dissolved,
the poems depend entirely on Patchen's accumulative tastes
and his sense of propriety. His arrangements contain two dis-
tinct types of emphasis: panoramic and commentatorial,
de-
pending on whether he is using the stuff taken from news-
papers, leaflets and working-class history, or is trying to
convey some private idea or sentiment.
The panoramic emphasis is predominantly displayed in his
well-known "Joe Hill Listens to the Praying," and in several
other poems. At the best, poems of this order can achieve,
through the juxtaposition of recognized fact, emotions of
ironic bitterness,
resentment
and determination.
At their
worst, general news-items,
together with personal remin-
iscenses of trees, moons, girls, simply rotate around the
"communist facts" of picket-lines, lynchings, Sacco and Van-
zetti, like a dull mind revolving around the excitement-core
of a bad conscience. In any event, the panoramas of our left-
wing poets are already becoming banal, not because picket-
lines, strikes, and Sacco and Vanzetti have been exhausted.
3°
as the subject-matter of American poetry-
on the contrary,
they have scarcely been approached-but
because the pano-
ramic method contents itself with merely calling the roll of
events and neglects the imaginative reconstruction.
As for the second type of emphasis in Patchen's verse: the
whole first section, called Introduction,
is an example of a
grouping of words, images and statements, unrelated to each
other except to the extent that the poet feels that all together
they constitute a commentary.
I claim no tide can wrest from us
What good we are,' nor country proud
Of lovers' Spring can gain parade
Of less than continents, to make u~ glad.
These correlations I find, in the main, totally ineffectual.
Even if one could figure out what the second part of the first
stanza means, and then relate it to the first part and to what
follows, I doubt that it would be worth the trouble in con-
nection with the quotations from the Declaration of Inde-
pendence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address which serve as
titles for the section. In fact, the idea behind this whole
section is foolish: a Marxist poet has, in effect, gone out of
his way to call attention to the fact that a pair of documents
written by people who were neither Marxists nor poets, are
vastly superior both in political clarity and with respect to
language to anything he has to say about them decades later.
His internal sense of propriety alone does not do justice
to Patchen's craftsman seriousness. It is absolutely essential
that he devote his attentions to the meaning-structure of
what he writes. Otherwise, his work will continue inevitably
to be segmented with passages incomprehensible not only
with respect to content but, primarily,
with regards to
poetical effect. What possible excuse can there be for chop-
ping off the perception contained in the first two lines of the
following with the badly-consonanted,
wordy, unevocative
and, to me at least, entirely meaningless, third line?
Whether my day is day lor you
or light on other plane ir other eyes,
is not renunciatory measure of speech.
A method which allows such irresponsihi'
" in selection
ought to be overhauled.
HAROLD RC ~llNBERG
A
World
Won
SEEDS OF TOMORROW,
by Mikhail Sholokhov. Knopf.
$2.50.
For the first time in my experience the collectivization cam-
paign of the Soviet government has been interpreted in terms
of flesh and blood.
Seeds of Tomorrow,
whose locale is the
remote Cossack village of Gremachy Log, is a living record
of these crucial days. The book translates the eff'ects of a
political decree into the actions and thoughts of breathing
human beings, and at the same time manages to remain an
exciting and swiftly moving tale of adventure,
love, humor,
intrigue and murder.
There was the incessant battle against time, the soil, weeds,
insects, drought, cold and flood. But the most complex and
puzzling enemy was man-or
the deeply ingrained traits of
men: ignorance, sloth, superstition, the resentment and active
opposition of those who yearned for a return to the old life.
Davidov, locksmith from the city, came to the backward
village as one of the twenty-five thousand sent out to aid in
the .collectivization program.
Everything was new and
MARCH,
193
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