400
PARTISAN REVIEW
tige and have to hire itself out as a petty trade. In either case, it
was bound to lose its dynamic existence as a profession indis–
pensable to the collective consciousness.
Poetry reacted to this dilemma in both ways. Part of it at–
tached itself to objects of worship-Nature, the antique, cults of
spirit-and gave itself up to quaintness and pictorialism. Another
part became ·an episode in the expansion of work, disciplining
itself to provide commodities of entertainment, propaganda, the
academy, advertising. These divergent courses of behavior have
supplied the poles of the Romantic-Classical debates. Both, how·
ever, are passive reactions to the contradiction.
When one speaks of poetry "since Poe and Baudelaire," he
does not mean all poetry written after 1830, nor even all the
accepted poetry in the Anthologies and Collected Works. What is
referred to is a particular unfolding movement or development,
which has no periphery but does seem to have a core.
It
is essen·
tially something new, an "emergent" of the crisis we have been
discussing, not merely a passive choice between making and inspir·
ation. The contradiction of poetry in the early nineteenth century
was an inner contradiction as well as a practical one, and was thus
loaded with creative power. Unlike that of the Middle Ages, it was
brought into being by a great historical advance, and it corres–
ponded to a spiritual predicament containing new creative ele·
ments. Man had been freed in his work from the social myths,
only to find himself dependent upon social relations represented
by no visible unifying image. Making lacked inspiration: inspira–
tion lacked content. The poetry called Modem was born out of
this contradiction as a thing fresh and unpredictable. Poetry in the
line of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, springing from the tension
that split the practice apart, has combined the old elements with
cultural materials belonging only to our own time, and has trans–
formed them.
Maritain's doctrine of the self-consciousness of modern
poetry, which omits a concrete analysis of the crisis, necessarily
misrepresents the direction in which poets have sought its solu·
tion.
*
To the extent that modem poetry is modem, it must
he
*It might be of interest to logicians that Maritain's idealistic dialectics sees
poelrJ
in general as containing a contradiction of essences: "Faire" vs. "Agir," "activity
of
the working reason" vs. "the spirit of Beauty." Poetry in his system achieves hariDOIJ
Of
synthesis only by a conscious act-in the past, as described in
Art et Scolastiq-.
