THE POET ON CAPITOL HILL
11
at the level of the things a smart woman ought to know. And that
destruction of value poisons the art itself at its springs.
It
cor–
rupts the artist's mind." "The quiet of mind, the cleanness of
thought, the belief in his work, the pureness and piety without
which no beautiful thing can be made"-these were what Mr.
MacLeish then defended as the right of artists against the clamor
of critics and agitators who were making the poet's immemorial
privileges impossible for him: they are "troubled in him and
destroyed.
mt
Mr. MacLeish had two bugbears ten years ago and they linger
with him still. One was literary criticism, whether among "cou–
turier critics" (whose "job is precisely to put on, one after the
other, the newest literary modes and parade them for the instruc–
tion of an audience whose single artistic ambition is never to
admire anything they ought not to admire; whose dogging fear is
that they may sometime be taken in")
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or among "Mr. Eliot's
numerous critical imitators," the "sterile little pedants" who emit
a "flood of didacticism and pomposity at which it is no longer
possible even to laugh" and who are burdening "every serious
review in the country" with "a load of sterile intellectualist finality
under which poetry, were the poets in the habit of believing their
book notices, must long since have perished.ma
His other bane was "the social cant." In 1933 he spoke
derisively of "the vogue of Marxian materialism and the loud and
earnest attacks of the Marxists upon everything not mentioned in
the text-books of Papa Marx" as having "put poetry in a defensive
position which is no less dangerous because it is also ridiculous.
The lady treed by a sow is not the less in peril because the sow is
an object of derision." The social critic, he argued, "rests his
whole case upon certain industrial hypotheses" relating to the
changes wrought in the world "in a given direction by the mechan–
ization of industry," but the "justification of his belief" has never
been established for the "one good and sufficient reason ... that
no one, engineer, scientist, philosopher, or literary critic has as
yet succeeded in discovering what exactly the thing called modern
industrialism is.'m
Poetry is not a skill like glass-blowing which mechanization
can destroy. It is an art. Or, if the word art is no longer admis–
sible and the social vocabulary alone has present meaning, then
