120
PARTISAN REVIEW
centrale or another of Marxism: the problem of society. I don't know how
I feel about it; I feel it as something that happened. The only "how" in my
feeling concerns the abuse of acquired political insight in fields where it
has no actualising application; where the stiffening of thought became
rigid, formulaistic, brittle: not to be touched: set. The artist and the critic
cannot set except dead. It is the old story of the chaos of life ordered in
art; if you order life first, there will
be
nothing to enliven your art. But it
is a pleasant and warming thing to see writers and artists aware of greater
areas of the life around and behind them.... Literary nationalism is no
help any more than German nationalism. The specifically American ele·
ments in our culture are good material for the historian and critic; the
practicing writer has them anyway and does not need to know what
they are.
7.
Ever since as a sophomore in high school I discovered-or rather just
had chucked in my face-the personal corruption and cowardice of our
wealthy classes in connection with the last world war, I have had an emo–
tional conviction that war is the very complete debauching devil. I am
therefore, I suppose, though later reading may have had something to do
with it, a pacifist and an isolationist. The responsibility of the writer
towards a general war is just his responsibility as a .citizen without office:
to work against war and the war spirit: even to witch-hunt that debauchery
if he can. But if war comes and is made popular I do not see that he can
do much more than shut up and keep his head. There will he no escape.
If
the war is not popular and the regime collapses there will he another sort
of war and he will he in it anyway.
Horace Gregory:
I.
a.) "Usable past" is a beautiful trick phrase, meaning as little or as
much as "Ivory tower" and is to he distrusted because it has entered .the
jargon of current criticism without proper evaluation. Am I conscious of
using a "usable past"? Certainly not while I am writing: the imagination
doesn't function that way. The "usable past" is realized before or after
writing a poem and is sometimes made "conscious" as the poem is edited
or rewritten. Mr. I. A. Richards, in his "Coleridge On Imagination" makes
a partial explanation of the phenomenon. I have found something that
may he called a "usable past" in a number of my poems: and the most
deeply hidden is an influence of Latin verse (of which I am "conscious")
