ARTHUR RIMBAUD
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this line, but these indignations served them very slightly in
strengthening or intensifying their poetic gifts. Today the indigna–
tion of social revolutionists and humanitarian poets has a similar
means of success: it takes the tragedy of society, views it in its full
horror of chaos and bloodthirsty anarchy, and glibly refers the
problem to the abstract judgment of a social or moral theory. The
whole central ground and condition of poetry-its source in pri–
vate integrity and responsibility-is evaded. The large language
of doctrine is set against the desperate and baffling nightmare of
modern life. The two remain unanalyzed and unreconciled, and as
a consequence most poetry and most social evangelism remain
empty of value.
Rimbaud comes in conveniently here as a model. His imita–
tors have become legion since 1918 and something like a public
nuisance during the past decade. These self-appointed spokesmen
of a new age of disillusion and cataclysm have almost succeeded
in
dragging his example and value down to the level of abuse and
misunderstanding where they were relegated by academicians and
humanist critics half a century ago. He is drawn on alternately
for visionary prophecy and for Isaiahan thunders, and though he
figures in the shaping of several authentic talents in our time, he is
one of the most misleading of influences-misleading because he
is badly read and superficially known in his fundamental quality.
Hart Crane obviously brought both a high creative zeal and a
strong personal recognition to his study of Rimbaud, and he made
something of his example, but elsewhere Rimbaud's intensity of
mind and sensibility has been vulgarized until what remains is
chiefly the spectacular defiance and moral shock of his surfaces.
He has been reduced either to crude diabolism or to a frantic effort
to recover the spiritual meaning and energy of life from encroach–
ing ruin. His images of search and conflict have been tumbled into
meaningless avalanches of sound and sense. His influence appears
to have been steadily attenuated: from the work of Salmon to that
of Claude!, from Perse to MacLeish, from Crane to Prokosch, from
Eluard and the more gifted surrealistes to Aragon or Dylan
Thomas, from Auden to Spender to Kenneth Patchen to (finally,
let us hope) Oscar Williams. It is a progress in disorganization,
in
accepting the fact of unrest and dissolution as the matter of
poetry, in substituting the distress and irresponsibility of the mod-
