Union arms." His poetical heirs ignored this fact.
They made no effort to comprehend the antithetical
force which had entered into control of American
life, cutting off its clear ascent, and preparing the
threat of tragedy for its future. Their "socialism"
was a compound of naive hope and good will. People
like Waldo Frank and, later, John Gould Fletcher,
still clinging to the dream of America's natural des':
tiny, were compelled to conceive America as a sort
of geographic mystery,
an occult time-and-space
shape from which all sort of vague, transcendental
glories would shed themselves over the face of hu-
manity.
Deprived by the age of even the possibility of
Whitman's blasting and fusing social enthusiasm,
Sandburg's verse of this period merely combined the
technical carelessness of the master with certain
new deficiencies of his own day. His poetry possessed
neither hardness,
clarity,
technical scrupulousness,
breadth of feeling,
nor purpose.
It went neither
straight up nor straight down ... it ambled about in
factories, wharves, city streets, appeas:ng itself with
sighs and an occasional grunt of indignation.
Mim-
icking the master's brazen "I celebrate Myself," it
would coyly insist, "This is the simple Me, and this
is the way I feel." Suddenly,
without warning,
it
might break into some super-fancy writing of the
American-in-Paris
type-an
anticipation of the
movement's destiny.
The sea-mist green of the bowl's bottom is a
dark throat of sky crossed by quarreling
forms of umber and ochre and yellow chang-
ing faces.
The essential subject, The People, entered his verse
occasionally,
but could find very little to do there.
American facts no longer moved naturally towards a
human center-they fell apart into isolated group-
ings, still retaining a certain air of secrecy and new-
ness, but tending more and more to become mere
items of local color, equivalent to other items col-
lected in any time or space of the universe.
By 1926, having passed through the downfall of
Wilson,
the Versailles Treaty,
the red-hunts,
the
inauguration of the period of prosperity,
and the
suspension of energy in the American labor move-
ment, the major strength of the populist
move-
ment in modern American poetry became com-
pletely detached from its social origins.
The
old theme of the broadest
average and the
countless examples and practical occupations in the
United States departed from the forms which it had
originated for itself. Poetry was now no longer the
"medium" of the masses of the people, but began
to justify itself by an existence and tradition of its
own. It poured its energies into the development
of
a new kind of aristocratism in verse, a sort of pessi-
mistic anti-plebeianism based on the refurbishing of
plebeian forms.
The function of this anti-popular movement
in
PARTISAN
REVIEW
eliminating and transforming as much of the old
matter of American sentiment in poetry as possible
was essentidly critical. It consisted of a denial of
the validity of anyone-way enthusiasm towards
things and events, of any "message" in poetry. It
created a dichotomy between spontaneous human
emotions and their poetic "correlatives".
It recog-
nized that the poet could no longer lift his direct
experiences into the realm of the absolute by sub-
suming them under the genius of America.
It as-
serted the non-existence of all absolute worlds and
of all absolute human beings. It acknowledged,
by
implication at least, that the negative force which
had entered American life, changing the character
and the meaning of all American enterprise,
had
produ_ed contradictions within the most intimate
responses and values of the individual's existence,
so contracting the area of possible certainty that no
love, no loyalty, no faith could any longer be ac-
scepted in the old way.
This poetry, tending towards pure decoration,
the
theme of negation and despair, and the faceless ob-
jectivity,
or to be more exact phenomenology,
of
the image and the historico-literary pattern,
openly
emphasised and exploited its lack of any dynamic
principle of coherence. This is thoroughly evident in
the
Wasteland,
the
Cantos,
the poems of Marianne
Moore, and other representative and "pure" works
of the period. The primary esthetic aim is a recol-
lective design, with whatever sentiments happen to
arise therefrom.
This is to have retained from Whitman's populist
poetry its objective or stylistic features:
masses of
phenomena,
popular flexibility of speech, but to have
critically rejected its American populist dynamism.
It was t his critical rejection that automatically
turned the formalists towards the European schools
for guidance,
and allowed them to contribute to
English and French poetry. They represent the end
of imperturbable American naivete,
and the new
linking of American and European values.
The blunt, taken-for-granted verse of Sandburg
was pushed into the background of influence by this
critical and objective current in American poetry.
His monolinear writings, lacking psychological com-
plication, verbal energy, associative scope-lacking,
in short, both modern science and modern skepti-
cism, had taken on a singularly unbearable,
left-
behind air in a cultural milieu dominated by the
paradoxes of Freud, Spengler, neo-catholicism,
clas-
sicist humanism, surrealism, etc. In the public schools
and anthologies he still continued to figure as a liv-
ing modern poet, but the emphases of the times were
against him.
With the revival of the American labor movement
since the beginning of the depression,
the reign of
the formalists in American poetry has come to a
close. Once again, poetry is attempting a statement,
an affirmation,
a pledge. Once again, it seeks to
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