ufactured by these people, the poetry of Sandburg
belonged and continues to belong to the early-model
stage.
But the unperfected functioning of these poetic
forms within
The People, Yes
raises the whole ques-
tion of the character and direction of modern Amer-
ican poetry. Whence did these forms originate,
and
to what end were they conceived?
Whitman himself provides the answer with re-
markable clarity in his Preface to the 1855 edition
of
Leaves of Grass:
in fact, he answers with a gigan-
tic catalogue of the things American poetry should
contain and celebrate:
"The genius of the United
States is not best or most in its executives or legis-
latures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or col-
leges or churches or parlors,
nor even in its news-
papers or inventors ... but always most in the com-
mon people. Their manners speech dress friend-
ships-the freshness and candor of their physiog-
nomy-the picturesque looseness of their carriage
... their deathless attachment to freedom, [etc. ] ...
these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic
and generous treatment worthy of it." The poet, he
finds elsewhere to be: "the channel of thoughts and
things without increase or diminution."
In the original context of this attempt to grasp
directly American life, the forms of modern verse
were no arbitrary word-play,
"pure art" design,
timeless warehouse,
or sophisticated simplist image.
The presentation of
facts,
visual or verbal, in poetry
sought its primary justification in an enthusiasm for
the historical role of concrete material accomplish-
ment. The object which is assumed to have a poetic
meaning merely because it exists, the phrase which
has poetic meaning merely because it has been writ-
ten or spoken, Williams'
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
or Moore's
"Dracontine cockatrices, perfect and poisonous
from the beginning",
they present themselves
as a contrast to sea-serpented regions "unlit
by the half-lights of more conscious art"
still look back longingly to that moment in the 19 th
century when humanity first sought the key to its fate
in the realities of its material acquisitions.
The dynamic principle with which Whitman fused
and completed his huge array of details was himself,
his own person, as a representative human individual
living within the particular influences of 19th century
America. His "poems of realities and science and of
the democratic average and basic equality" had
meaning because "in the center of all, and object of
all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic
and spiritual evolution poems and everything direct-
ly or indirectly tend, Old Worid or New."
In the center of all stood the Human Being
I
22
Every detail of American life, every wheelbarrow,
every word in every book in the library, every ma-
chine, everything cast off and floating away, was
lifted to the level of poetry by what America was
doing and would do in the future for the liberation
of the Human Being.
To understand,
therefore,
how the forms of mod-
ern verse created under the wing of Whitman came
to detach themselves from the popular motives of
Whitman's "particulars
and details magnificently
moving in vast masses," it is necessary to bear in
mind the historic decline of America's democratic
hopes.
By a cynical historical coincidence, the modern at-
tempt to revive the poetry of American enthusiasm
came about at the very moment when the World
War was preparing to bestow world-hegemony upon
the United States. The dynamic role of America's
material advancement
was about to undergo its hu-
man test. Could it function, as Whitman had pre-
dicted, as the "greatest factor in known history" for
man's liberation?
For an instant,
Wilson created the appearance
that the promise would be realised. The kings and
tyrants would be overthrown,
the dependent nations
liberated,
democracy would be guaranteed every-
where. Almost at once, however, came the unmask-
ing: the voice was the voice of the old democracy,
but the hand, the controlling force, was the hand
of the new finance imperialism.
The liberating
institutions of the nineteenth century had evolved
steadily, and almost invisibly, into the slavemaking
apparatus of the twentieth.
The America con-
fronted by the newly-born "American School" of
writers, with its plebeian, populist bias, its faith in
what the whole people could do within the frame-
work of political democracy,
was no longer a "na-
tion of nations" ordained to win for man every-
where in the world freedom from all chains and op-
pression-the
America of world-monopolies
was
characterised by a quite opposite species of interna-
tionalism.
A small section of the American working class
and intellectuals resisted this perversion of Amer-
ica's destiny. The struggles of the I.W.W.
and in-
dividual
socialists,
the trade-union resistance to
American intervention in the U.S.S.R.,
the anti-war
demonstrations
and the great strikes,
represented
the continuing life of the American democratic
spirit. But it was no longer a question of one-sided
enthusiasm,
of a straight,
unbroken and peaceful
road towards the aggrandizement
and perfection of
the human being.
Whitman had definitely dated his poetry: "I know
very well that my
Leaves
could not possibly have
emerged or been fashion'd or completed,
from any
other era than the latter half of the Nineteenth
Century, nor any other land than democratic Amer-
ica, and from the absolute triumph of the National
OCTOBER,
1936
