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PARTISAN REVIEW
change in the former threatens the source of the latter which is one's only
consolation, and the latter can only change. by ceasing to console. Miss
Bogan, however, recognised this temptation and resisted it.
My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,
My body hear no echo save its own,
Yet will the desperate mind, maddened
and
proud,
Seek out the storm; escape the bitter spell.
But the price and privilege of growth is that the temptation resisted is
replaced by a worse one. No sooner does the mind seek to escape the
bitter spell than the lying Tempter whispers-
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life or of the work
The poet who escapes from the error of believing that the relation of his
life to his work is a direct one, that the second is the mirror image of the
first, now falls into the error of denying that there need be any relation
at all, into believing that the poetry can develop autonomously, provided
that the poet can find it a convenient Myth. For the Myth is a set of values
and ideas which are impersonal and so break the one-one relationship of
poetry· to experience by providing other standards of importance than the
personally interesting, while at the same time it is not a religion, that is
to say, it does not have to be believed in real life, with all the effort and
suffering which that implies.
Thus we find modern poets asking of a general idea, not Is It True?,
but Is
It
Exciting? Is It Poetically useful?, and whether they are attracted
to Byzantium and The Phases of the Moon, like Yeats, or to the ld or
Miss History like his younger and less-talented colleagues, the motive and
its motions are the same.
But the escape from the Self without the surrender of the Self is, of
course, an iliusion, for it is the Self that still chooses the particular avenue
of escape. Thus Yeats, the romantic rebel against the Darwinian Myth of
his childhood with its belief in The Machine and Automatic Progress,
adopts as poetic 'organisers' woozy doctrines like The Aristocratic Mask
and The Cyclical Theory of Time while remaining personally, as Eliot
rather slyly remarks, 'a very sane man'; others fashion an image out of
the opposites of puritanical parents or upper class education. And still
the personal note appears, only now in the form of its denial, in a certain
phoney dramatisation, a 'camp' of impersonality. Further the adoption of
a belief which one does not really hold as a means of integrating experi·
ence poetically, while it may produce fine poems, limits their meaning to
the immediate context; it creates Occasional poems lacking any resonance
beyond their frame. (Cf., for example Yeats'
Second Coming
with Eliot's
East Coker)
.
To have developed to the point where this temptation is real, and theu
to resist it, is to realise that the relation of Life to Work is dialectical, a
change in the one presupposes and demands a change in the other, and
that
belief and behaviour have a similar relation, that is to say, that beliefs
