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PARTISAN REVIEW
spirit to imagine and desire.... ·This failure of the spirit is a
failure from which only poetry can deliver us.... Poetry is art,
and, being art, committed to this earth, confined within the shal–
low water of this air. Its matter is what men can see and sense
and know.... Its end is man: not men alone, not men in secret–
men as they are different,-men turned souls and grown distin–
guishable for eternity, but man. The common loveliness that all
men everywhere have known: the common fears: the common
passions: the despairs.... Poetry alone in such a time as ours
when all the images are blurred and doubtful, when men go
starved because they cannot wish in common-poetry alone imag–
ines, and imagining creates, the loyalty for lack of which we
cannot live; for lack of which we cannot even eat, be covered
and be warm.... For what is lacking in the crisis of our time is
only this: this image. Its absence
is
the crisis.... The defense of
poetry in this time is a challenge. It is a challenge to all those
who quarrel about the means by which the people shall be saved
to hold their tongues and be silent until the poets shall have given
the people speech. It is a challenge to all those who would-stop
the mouths of the poets with their pantry notions of pure poetry
and their gentleman's gentleman's Standards of what a poet does,
to hold their tongues and be humble until the poets have been
heard ... [The poet may bring] the mind of this nation one step
nearer to an understanding of its will, and one step nearer to an
imagination of the world in which it can believe and which,
believing, it can bring about.
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It might be supposed that one such mission in life would keep a
man's hands full, but Mr. MacLeish proclaims his second calling
no less vehemently:
Those who, like myself, assert that the threat to democratic
civilization in this country is the threat of fascism mean that the
culture of the Republic is threatened by the existence in the
United States of the kind of situation which has produced fascism
elsewhere, and that that situation in the United States has already
given indications, human and other, of developing in the known
direction. . . . It is this issue, as I see it, which is presented to
American libraries, for it is upon American libraries that the
burden of this education must fall. It cannot fall upon [the
schools ... the newspapers ... the magazines ... the book pub-
lishers ... the radio ... the screen]. But this burden
CAN
be
entrusted to the libraries.... The libraries, in brief, are the only
institutions in the United States capable of dealing with the con–
temporary crisis in American life in terms and under conditions
which give promise of success.
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