10
PARTISAN REYIEW
which excuses him from care. The suggestion that there are things
in the world-ideas, conceptions, ways of thinking-which the
writer-artist should defend from attack-the suggestion above all
that he was under an obligation to defend the inherited culture-–
would strike him as ridiculous.
19
Mr. MacLeish does not stop to explain precisely where, among the
great artists of the world, he finds so abject a detachment from
values. Indeed he mentions values often without ever telling us
exactly what he means by the word. Yet it was only in 1928 that he
was venting his sarcasm on critics who were insisting that literature
establish just those connections between aesthetic and practical
values-between art and action, justice, and human salvation-£or
which he now cries. He argued then for "mere poetry, poetry made
out of poetry, poetry without sex, smirks or graces, poetry without
the sentimentality which passes among us for ironic, poetry with–
out tags of wit." Such poetry, he said, leaves the function-claiming
critic (Edmund Wilson was cited as the case in mind) "with his
weight weightily on the wrong foot, exclaiming about Real Lift.
(something, presumably, more real than poetry) and stabbing at
that part of the volume where its life does not lie."
20
He went
further:
The intuitions of the poet are valid and may he accepted only
because his loyalty is to his art, because his sole test of the accept·
ability of a word or a phrase or a poem is the test of his art and
not the test of his politics or his social indignation. This is not to
say that the true poet is without prejudice. He has of course the
prejudices of his blood, his countryside, his education, if you
will, his "class." But ... there remain certain individuals who
believe that the first and inescapable obligation of the poet is his
obligation to his art; who believe that the fact that the practice of
his art is difficult in no way releases him from that obligation;
who believe that the desertion of his art for any reason, even the .
noblest, even the most humane, is nevertheless desertion.
He denounced the "couturier criticism" that legislates under the
stress of current fads in journalism, social ideas, or propagandist
values. He relegated all such special pleading to the corruptions
of "the Literature Business" whose "exponents are irresponsible
people, people with no literary standing and therefore people
answerable only to the fashion publishers who employ them" and
whose "inevitable effect is to deprive all writing of value and put it
