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PARTISAN REVIEW
neo-classicists ... wrote erudite poetry.... All the writers joined
in a common cult of the intelligence: between a poem by Mme.
de Noailles and certain pages of the novels of Regnier, between
the phrases of Anatole France, Maurras, Barres, and the poems
of Moreas, between the tirades of Paul Adam, the invectives of
Mirbeau and certain social poems of Verhaeren, the difference
was only one of meter and rhyme....
In this situation, it is interesting to remember, it was foreigners
like Rilke and Yeats who received refreshment from whatever
feeble sparks of Symbolism remained alive. (Villiers de l'lsle
Adam was such a spark. Rilke went back to Baudelaire.)
The birth of Dada coincided with the renovation of the "con–
ception" of the universe, and of the spiritual life, by the scientists
whose work, conceived and tested before the War, became generally
available thereafter. "Relativist hypotheses made absolute truth
recede far beyond the touch of human reason"; the Freudian
hypotheses broke down and complicated "the grossly simplified
analyses, in the moral field, of the preceding era." Art, always
acting as a symptom, and always well before the event (even in its
1
least energetic periods), had already announced the change (Rim–
baud, two generations previously). An undercurrent of revolt
against officially respectable literature, colored with occultism,
interest in the supernatural, the erotic and the sadistic, had begun
before the war.
J
arry was its chief mystificator. Apollinaire, of
Polish blood, born in Rome, brought back into French literature a
forgotten interest of the Symbolists: an interest in "popular
poetry,"-the literature produced by everyday life. Popular songs
and the machines and apparatuses then beginning to change the
technique of European living appeared in his poetry more often
than the esoteric trappings of the macabre. He rarely tried to ele–
vate his tone to match the sublimity acceptable to French writing.
He worked best on the level of wit. He was able "to create an
atmosphere wherein the banal, the daily, the threadbare theme was
transfigured." He was also capable of true pathos, and it was his
wit and pathos which were deleted almost entirely from the Sur–
realist movement whose name derived from one of his invented
terms. "It was things themselves [which interested Apollinaire],
happenings which ought continually to become 'the marvelous,' if
looked at with a certain bias."
Dada, soon dead and denounced by Surrealism, was, in its
