value of her poetry in her precIsion and, more important,
in her ability to
feel ideas.
He never questions her religious
desire for "personal revelation" in relation to the themes
which make up our poetic tradition.
On the other hand,
Emerson is taken to task for having ridden the waves of
industrial progress, for being the harbinger of a social order
negating the old South. It would be futile to ask Mr. Tate
to be consistent, for his premises preclude consistency.
On Hart Crane, Mr. Tate runs the full gamut of his
contradictions.
He makes a valid criticism 'of
The Bridge-
that Crane's symbol of the bridge does not have adequate
associations in the social context, hence its meaning is as
dispersive as a cloud-a valid criticism, but his reasons for
this criticism run him into the ground. No myth, claims
Mr. Tate, can unify the folk-ways of American life. And
Crane's search for one to symbolize the direction of our
civilization came from his innocence of American history.
Here Mr. Tate quarrels with a poet's intentions and beliefs.
Crane is committing a heresy in seeking, however vaguely,
a new way of life. But Eliot is granted a natural right to
his caustic poetry of pessimism. And Mr. Tate can even
manage to appreciate the poetry of John Peale Bishop, who,
God knows, has no perceptions of any importance,
by ex-
tolling his metrical skill. Since his social criticism flutters
on the breezes of his prejudices, Mr. Tate's formal criticism
cannot be integrated with it, and he constantly shuttles from
one to the other. Mr. Tate makes a distinction between a
"poetry of the will" and a "poetry of the imagination," in
order to discredit those social assertions in literature with
which he is not in sympathy. The poets Mr. Tate approves
of-Shakespeare and Dante-wrote
a poetry of the imagina-
tion. They were at peace with their environment.
Although
nourished by it, they cannot be judged by the beliefs they
assimilated. Their actual poetic statements are neither "true
nor false". A poetry of the will, on the other hand, is a
poetry of revolt, containing assertions of the poet's political
ideals. Mr. Tate, following the fashion set by Eliot, ascribes
the gaudiness of some of Shelley's poetry to his political
convictions, to his having written a poetry of the will.
After these rationalizations are torn away, what .remains
of Mr. Tate's poetic criticism? Some stray insignts, a medley
of social prejudices,
and a metrical approach to poems.
Theoretically,
Mr. Tate's position leaves no way to a con-
sistent social and esthetic judgment of poetry, because he
sees no relation between the meaning of a poem and the
social meanings of a historical period.
Hence you rarely feel, when reading his essays on poetry,
that you are on a train of ideas headed for some destination.
Apt observations are wiped out by qualifying statements
which put you on the track of an opposing theory.
It doesn't look as though Mr. Tate will ever learn that
you can't tread the earth and walk a tight-rope at the same
time.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
Variety
A TIME TO DANCE,
by
C.
Day Lewis. Random House.
$1.75.
"Curiosity," says Day Lewis, "is, I suppose, the most
dangerous and the most vital of all human virtues." Perhaps
Day Lewis is not far wwng; perhaps for the moment we
can agree that he is right, that curiosity is a good if not too
serious human motive, and that he has braced himself upright
PARTISAN
REVIEW
to answer questions. Granting this, I prefer to think that
he has animated his prose and verse by the creation of a
character,
a composite portrait of himself and others-the
new English poet, a young man who has assumed the duty
of re-instructing a bitter, faithless, rotting social organism,
a post-war world. The character is, of course, still incom-
plete; he is a "Work In Progress," fated, like all of us, to
grow old, perhaps to die in the next war, or worst of all,
to exist within a kind of living death that too often surrounds
the poet as he enters middle age-the fate of excellent talkers
like Coleridge-or
the obsession of grandeur covering W ords-
worth like a pall.
Given such a poet who is not speaking for himself alone,
but for himself as well as others, the present book is further
proof of generous intentions.
The essay, "Revolution in
Writing," is a sequel to the earlier prose, "A Hope For
Poetry"; the poem, "A Time To Dance," extends the purpose
of "The l\ilagnetic Mountain",
and the play, a choral ballet
not intended for the stage, follows the precedent of Auden's
"Paid on Both Sides", which was an experiment in dramatic
form, .neither play nor poem, but a charade.
If we agree that we are listening to the voice of a spokes-
man for Day Lewis (rather than Day Lewis himself, or
Spender, or Auden) we can then hear what he has to say
with reasonable detachment.
His ultimate desires are well
. in view: in the near future rises the hope of a new poetic
myth, a myth which includes the use of machine imagery
(tractor and automobile, radio and airplane) and at the end
of its progress the vision of a classless society. Toward this
end the poet is drawn as surely as though he were attracted
by the invisible forces of electromagnetism.
Among his de-
sires (though these may be retarded by indecision, by his
physical existence within a hostile society) is the hope of
'retaining a sound body and clean mind. He is conscious of
writing revolutionary literature,
yet he seems to force his
will toward communism; and though the germ of his revo-
lutionary desire is genuine, its hothouse growth is less actual
than the germ itself.
Because the spokesman is near the center of controverSy
in contemporary literature, we have much to learn from him.
His merits, his personal sacrifices are so obvious that his
gestures are scarcely short of the heroic; but such a poet
is not likely to know his limitations: he is likely to mista~e
the future as accomplished fact, to prove, against his will,
that his intellect has a swifter pace than his emotions. That
is why, I think, Day Lewis's abilities remain potentials of
a sensitive imagination (read the shorter lyrics in the present
volume) ; that is why I believe his haste endangers his more
ambitious poems, which at their worst, are merely thin and
repetitious.
"The Revolution In Literature" originated as a speech
by radio; and it was written to be heard by the English
middle-class professionals: the college instructor,
the young
writer who ha5 not read Marx,
young advertiSing men,
young journalists-and even young businessmen who have
wearied of the pose of seeming cynical. To the American
communist, this speech may seem naive or dangerously Pla-
tonic. He is likely to forget that Day Lewis's spokesman
has the kind of Liberal heritage that permits free speech in
Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons. It is a heritage that can
allow for contradictions,
like "His Majesty's Communist
Government," a phrase that must sound strange to all Amer-
icans. It explains, I think, Day Lewis's happy definition of
politics (one that seems' unreal on this side of the Atlantic) ;
