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Johnny's funeral. Curiously enough, none of Cummings' light verse is in–
cluded, but the inclusion of Swift's wonderful poem on his own death is
enough to make the book worth the price of admission.
In his introduction to the book, W. H. Auden is engaged in pointing
out a serious moral about the relationship of the poet to society. "The more
homogeneous a society, the closer the artist is to everyday life, the easier it
is for him to communicate what he perceives.... The more unstable a soci–
ety,
and the more detached from it the artist, the clearer he can see, but the
harder it is for him to communicate it to others." The first situation is favor–
able to the writing of light verse ; the latter leads to the difficulty of modern
poetry, although light verse continues to be written and becomes an expres–
sion of "the Unconscious." But when Auden cites various examples, the gap
between such general statements and the complexity of a given poet betrays
him. Browning is mentioned as a poet who "in a less socially specialized
period might well have been the easiest poet of his generation, instead of
the most difficult." What was lacking? "Without a secure place in society,
without an intimate relation between himself and his audience, without . . .
those conditions which make for the writing of Light Verse, the poet finds
it difficult to grow beyond a certain point." How far short this explanation
falls of being adequate is shown by considering Tennyson, Browning's exact
contemporary (they were born and died within three years of each other),
who enjoyed a secure place in society, an intimate relation between hi.nself
and his audience, and yet found it difficult to J!,rOw beyond a certain point.
In fact, his security and intimacy were what prevented his growth. The diffi–
culty with this and other statements in Auden's introduction arises from the
fact that he has started with the social generalization and then examined the
poet, rather than derived the generalization from a consideration of the poets
of a given period.
LETTERS
Note on "We Are From Kronstadt"
Paris
.\ugust 29, 1938.
Dear Comrade Macdonald: - I read
with the liveliest interest your pages on
the Soviet cinema in P. R. Perhaps I can
fill up a lacuna. The Stalinist falsifica·
tion of history is shameless in two ways
- intellectually and morally. The latter
I
myself experienced, with a feeling of
outrage. when I attended in Brussels, in
:-lovember of 1936, soon after leaving the
USSR, a showing of
We Are from Kron –
stadt.
This film pretends to recreate certain
episodes in the defense of Leningrad–
Petrograd in '19, apparently November
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
'19. Some of its scenes were successful.
and others moved me anyway, since I my–
self lived through those days. Zinoviev
was then leader of the Petrograd Soviet;
the two agitators- the principal charac–
ters in the film - were Evdokimov and
Zorine; the rear was defended by the
Cheka Commissar, Bakaev; an old anar–
chist, Chatov, played the leading part in
the army; and finally, it was Trotsky who
saved the city, practically lost at the time
he arrived on the scene. (I described all
this in my novel,
Ville Conquise.)
And
this epic film, dedicated to the memory
of the men who took part in this great
event," mentioned not a single one of these
heroes - for the good reason that almost
all of them had been shot as traitors.
Zinoviev, Evdokimov, and Bakaev wen t
