12
PARTISAN REVIEW
it is the most effective means of searching and translating and
recording in permanent and recreative symbols the experience
of the race. All the histories of the Church ever written are foot–
notes to Dante. And the essential life of this century will be read
in poetry long after its sociologies have dissolved into the jour–
nalistic pother from which they spring.... And [our] grandchil–
dren will find in
Anabase
with its biblical and Asian images, and
in
The Waste Land,
with its Eastern references and its Eliza–
bethan phrase, the understandable answer to questions neither
Mr. Keynes nor Major Douglas nor the whole literature of Marx–
ism will be able to resolve.
25
Those were the days when Mr. MacLeish was arguing for poetic
detachment from all such irrelevancies and distractions in terms
both ardent and ironic.
He
turned out poems on the theme. Poets,
he said, are persons of
Known vocation following troops: they must sleep with
Stragglers from either prince and of both views:
The rules permit them to further the business of neither:
It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers:
Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas–
Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers:
There is nothing worse for ou.r trade than to be in style:
He that goes naked goes farther at last than another:
Wrap the hard in a flag or a school and they'll jimmy his
Door down and he thick in his bed- for a month:
Besides Tovarishch how to embrace an army?
How to take to one's chamber a million souls?
How to conceive in the name of a column of marchers?
The things of the p<>et are done to a man alol.'le
As the things of love are done-or of death when he hears
the
Step withdraw on the stair and the clock tick. only:
Neither his class nor his kind nor his trade may come near him
There where he lies ·on his left arm and will die:
Nor his
clas~
nor his kind nor his trade when the blood is jeering
Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms ?
26
