18
PARTISAN REVIEW
about the modern chaos which so disturbs his social critics in fifty
or sixty lines than they will ever say in all their volumes. And
said it ten years before. And the increasing plurality and anonym–
ity of modern life which gives contemporary social criticism its
only living justification has a clearer expression in modern verse
than it has yet had in modern critical prose.
42
Whereas in 1938 he said that
Modern poetry signifies,
if
it signifies anything, the effort to
regain for poetry the public speech of which it has been so long
deprived. It is a revolt against the almost neurotic conception of
poetry which exiled poets from the actual world.... The intel–
lectual construction of
T~
Waste Land,
and the theories under–
lying that construction, have nothing to do with modern ·poetry,
though they have a great deal to do with that very eminent
modern poet Mr. T. S. Eliot. Indeed, they are in essence nothing
but a kind of broken-hearted and ironic inversion of the almost
universal practice of those earlier centuries in England and
France when new poems (and a new age) were built quite can–
didly and believingly out of the broken stones of classical
antiquity. The only functional difference between.Eliot's classical
allusions and Milton's is that Milton's stones were chosen to
embellish the edifice he was building while Eliot's were chosen
to betray the tragic shoddiness of his time.
48
And in 1939 he said that the poetry of Verlaine, Laforgue; Eliot,
and Pound really belonged to the last decades of the Nineteenth
Century and the first two decades of this: "a poetry formed not by
the human and political necessities of our own world but by the
literary·necessities of the world before the war":
The poetry we call contef!1porary was originally, and still
remains, a poetry of literary revolt.... It was, in its own time,
a needed and. cleansing poetry of literary revolt. It was never a
poetry capable of the new labor of construction which must now
be done. . . . It is this characteristic of contemporary poetry
which explains its failure to make recognizable to us our experi–
ence of our time. To write in faith and credit of such experience
as ours, and to bring it to recognition, requires the responsible
and dangerous language of acceptance and belief. The respon–
sible language of acceptance and belief is not possible to the
poetry of literary revolt."
