Vol. 3 No. 3 1936 - page 29

.other, transient and uncertain.
This appears all the more
plausible if one realizes to what degree some of his recent
poetry contradicts the ambiguity of his critical attitude. In
Vienna,
for example, the seminal energy of the material and
the sympathies of the poet are fused into an unequivocal
poetic statement of revolutionary import.
However, if we keep in mind the nature of Spender's
indecision, we cannot but see how our own sectarian sins
come back to plague us. For it should be said that much of
Spender's shrinking from the ultimate meaning of Marxism
arises from the false interpretations of it transmitted by vari-
ous populists and vulgarizers,
who insist on equating their
fiery own
village culture with dialectics. Their strident sim-
plifications violate the intrinsic character of art-mediums at
so many points that a revolt against the critical system
brooking such vulgarizations becomes inevitable. When Spen-
~er attributes to Marxism a gross use of literature as prop-
aganda, the denial of a relative autonomy to the artistic
imagination, as well as dictatorial precepts as to material,
style and imagery, he has merely taken the "leftists" at their
word. One may admit Spender's naivete in quoting Lenin
and some obscure sectarian as if both equally represent the
Communist position-though Lenin is quoted approvingly
and the sectarian with aversion-and still deplore the blight
that sectarianism casts on our literary relations. In part at
least, many of Spender's vagaries are but the other side of
the "leftist" picture. Hence it is a matter of little surprise
to read his opinion that "to the perfect Communist literary
critic it must be a matter of almost dumbfounded astonish-
ment that a Chinese coolie who is a member of the party,
cannot write books far better than the bourgeois propaganda
of Shakespeare." Here is the exaggerated, but not altogether
unjustified, reaction of a sensitive mind to vulgarized l\1arx-
Ism.
But enough of quarreling. No criticism of this book would
be complete without an appreciation of the merit of Spender's
analysis of specific writers. If at this stage of his develop-
ment, the social approach to the literary problems of the
immediate present seems at times to confound Spender, it
has, paradoxically enough, seemed to have worked in his
favor in dissecting creations that cannot be added to, in the
sense that they belong to an epoch just completed. And this
suggests that in' the esthetic of migration Marxism will yet
prove the stronger attraction.
In his essay on James, Spender includes an analysis of
Joyce that, to my mind, is in some ways the best on the sub-
ject. His insight into the weaknesses of Joyce, which the
gravity and size of
Ulysses
have tended to obscure for most
critics, is of extreme value for a precise definition of what
Joyce did achieve. He perceives the dialectic function of
wealth in James'
world when he says: "Because money has
a symbolic value in his work, it has been assumed that a
passion for money was a part of James'
social snobbery. No
doubt he liked the best that Europe could give ....
However,
the fascination of gold' in his books is that it is at once the
symbol of release from the more servile purposes of the world
in which we live, and also supremely the symbol of the
damned." The frcnzy and transformations of Lawrence, and
the way these affected and impaired the bulk of his literary
forms, Eliot's place in modern poetry, his "remarkable neg-
lect" of the external world, the dimness of his concept of
tradition and its working out as a theology that leads his
criticism astray-these are but radii from a sphere of per-
ceptions that is both the fond farewell to an age and its
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
summation. In the light of such careful love, one must be-
lieve in Spender's promise "that the whole point of artists
adopting a revolutionary position is that their interests may
become social, and not anti-social, and that their criticism
may help to shape a new society."
PHILIP RAHV
New Poetry
THE IRON LAND,
by Stanley Burnshrrw. Centaur Press.
$2.00.
TO MY CONTEMFORARIES,
by Edwin Rolfe. Dy-
namo. $1.00.
Both Burnshaw and Rolfe write not merely as contemp-
lative advocates of class consciousness and the final victory
of the proletariat,
but from the point of view of being
themselves participants in the class struggle.
Consistently
with this outlook, their poems are built on a simpler plan
than those of the "metaphysicals" among the younger radi-
cal poets-Fearing,
Patchen, Rukeyser, etc.-the aim being
to communicate an emotion directly rather than to extract
one from a landscape or concept-design built for that pur-
pose.
Burnshaw's book, a narrative poem of more than a hun-
dred pages, is devoted to expressing the feeling of slavery
and imprisonment that goes with a job in a large factory.
Large-scale industry under capitalism imposes upon millions
of workers tasks which can have no meaning to them; and
a job in a factory, especially to one who is alert to hills,
winds, and springtime, is therefore no different from a stretch
in jail. Burnshaw's poem is one long moan, arising from
the conflict within the spirit between erotic and vernal
stimulation and the drab compulsion to punch a timeclock.
Sensitive to the changes of the weather, to flowers, and to
the earth's influences, Burnshaw is filled with horror and
despair by the mechamcal demands of industrial
routine.
His repugnance is, in fact, so complete it goes beyond the
special anguishes occasioned by industrial labor under the
present system and fastens its accusations to the body of
industry itself. His protest is of an anarchistic, rather than
a Marxist, order. Freedom appears to him as freedom from
the factory:
With such a room for laboring the three
Soon spun the tangled steel into a network
...
But now having achieved,
The three suddenly saw how eagerness
Had duped them of a chain of hours beneath
The earth's spring weather.
And even of the revolution of the future he dreams in non-
industrial images--actually,
in what one might call, con-
sidering the experience rendered in the rest of the book,
anti-industrial
images:
Build a world fit for the bloodborn free! .••
Into the hills, valleys, prairies, roerywhere
Your soil holds food and water, your great earth
Infinite strength teeming with golden worlds
Dreamed by the wisest dead!
In short, though Burnshaw's consciousness has, no doubt,
carried him past anarchism, his emotions are faithful to the
primitive revulsion with which the young, inexperienced
worker, especially the white-collar nature-lover of whom he
is writing, first experiences the contact of modern industry.
This may be due to the fact that his poem was drafted in
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