BOOKS
engineering. The delayed adolescence of this century holds down
Theory
of Flight.
The highroad,
U.S.
1, is a more tractable super-image, for its over-
tones imply not escape
from,
but passage
to.
Possibly it is laid down to
carry too much traffic which might as well stay at home. We cannot
tell; only a detour has been completed; the freight has scarcely got
under way. But no more than
Theory of Flight
does
U.S.
1 give people
what is good to hear. Its
Book of the Dead
tells how, to cut costs, a
corporation killed off carload after carload of workers by filling their
lungs full with glass powder which they had them drill dry out of a
hydraulic super-conduit, and sold at a good price. This abomination
needs to be made memorable. But as not one line of its thousand lines
describes the wage system, a goodly number of poetry readers will say,
"We haven't the remotest idea why anyone but a dumb cluck worked
there. It's a free country, isn't it?" The poem attacks the excrescences of
capitalism, not the system's inner nature. Like any good capitalist, Ru-
keyser condemns bad, shockingly bad, working conditions, but makes no
root attack upon everyday exploitation. Capital, the parasite is parricide:
Yet not a line of all this condemnation shows how its doom is sealed in
the pay envelope.
A limited philosophy limits poetry; political and aesthetic failings
have one root. Her genius, knowing that "poetry can extend the docu-
ment," guided her to the Egyptian
Book of the Dead
and to the
Con-
gressional Record;
but the rewriting does not click. The verse slips from
the fulcrum balance through sound and time of parallel or contrasting
thoughts which, even in a machine line, constitutes verse. There are many
portraits of the worker victims; none strike to the heart, for unscientific
socialism, which shares only in the bourgeois' humanity, is more moved
by lads without jobs than by men with jobs. How well she can draw
when stirred is shown in a separate portrait of an unemployed boy who
has his sister give him a short haircut so that he can go out and get some
work to do. But she shows no such understanding of the wage system as
Emerson shows in his
Chartist's Complaint,
that magical confounding of
all nature with class struggle. Consequently, the vision of white dust
through which workers drill swiftly to their deaths, for all the abstract
terror of its sharp line and value, is out of scale like the landscape of
The Slave in the Dismal Swamp
of Longfellow who, knowing less about
exploitation than she, was likewise distracted from the difficult human
to easy nature.
Yet Longfellow knew much. Not merely small points,-how to
rhyme where we inclined toward muteness, but big points of methodology.
He is remarkable.
Paul Revere's Ride
is a paradigm of a conjugation of
political narrative poetry. Actually bare of any content but the most
poetically abstract, it tells all readers everything, but yet closes with what
winning courtesy, telling us we already knew it all! In every particular,
what a contrast it makes to the prevailing manners, whose purposes are,
precisely,
not
to tell a story. They do not flatter our self esteem, making
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