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PARTISAN REYJEW
In the measure that poetry has concentrated upon itself, that
is to say, upon spirit, its art has decayed. Hence poetry's night of
the soul; profession no longer, it has isolated itself and by "its
own trend allows no harmony with anything else."
Maritain quotes Baudelaire and Rimhaud to show their con·
sciousness of poetry as a kind of
lawwledge,
and finds in this effort
towards unlimited knowing the basis of Rimhaud's abandonment
of poetry. The surrealists, too, have been "taken in the trap" of
knowledge. They made the additional mistake of confusing the
"passivity of inspiration" with "psychic automatism" and regard–
ing the "animal unconscious" as the "unique source of poetry."
Finally, Maritain reconciles, or seems to reconcile, himself
(the last three paragraphs of the recent discourse are exceptionally
indistinct) to poetry's "descent into the lived-in subject." He pro·
poses as the aim of "poetic knowledge" a primary unconscious
deeper than "the Freudian," the "unconscious of spirit
at
its
source,"
(his italics) reached, not through the "inquisitive intelli–
gence," hut through "docility," and releasing an element, similar
to melody in music, "which is the spirit of poetry." Thus his argu·
ment ends by leading the way to something like Eliot's "still point
of the turning world," where the "soul" of poetry and its "art"
are reunited.
In sum, as Maritain sees it, poetry, which had always been
an episode in the history of work, became in the nineteenth century
a drama of religious experience.
What evidence supports this curious tale according to which
in the age of relative values and hollow men one activity for the
first time turns to the absolute, becoming excessively, even im·
piously, otherworldly? So that the champion of one of the world's
great Churches feels called to remind the errant of material
conditions.
Maritain's account of the present situation of poetry rests on
his craft interpretation of the art of the past and his theory of the
dialectical conflict between the "soul" and "body" of poetry
("enthusiasm" or inspiration versus the "work"). "The very
career of the word 'poetry'," he hegins, "seems to me highly in–
structive. Only at a comparatively recent time has this word come
to designate the
poetry;
previously it signified the
art,
the activity
of the working reason, and it is in this sense that Aristotle, and the
