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PARTISAN REVIEW
the support he found in constantly expanding method-to them
the Wright brothers would have seemed to be re-enacting the fatal,
not to say heretical, error of Icarus.
It was, then, towards a new synthesis of making and inspira·
tion, a synthesis made possible through an alliance with science
and the experimental dissolution and re-combination of the living
elements of the poetry of the past, that Poe, Baudelaire, and
Rimbaud turned modem poetry. This carried them not deeper into
poetry (poetry has no depths entirely its own, in Maritain's sense)
but abroad into other fields which science was just discovering–
psychology, folklore, anthropology, history-and for which its
tools have yet to be perfected. Nor would they allow poetry merely
to trail after systematic research. "Science," cried Rimbaud,
"doesn't go fast enough fQr us." Having been systematically disci·
plined, the imagination could go ahead of the sciences into the
unknown,* and the accuracy and flexibility of its language was to
become the standard of poetry.
It is this deliberateness and consciousness of purpose that
chiefly give Maritain pause. "Deliberate undertaking," he notes
parenthetically on Rimbaud's letter, "and there already the trap
lies hidden." But scientific "cultivation of the soul" is not a trap
for poetry. It is rather a snare set by it for the organized religious,
which also cultivate souls, but with methods and for purposes of
their own. And this trap of poetry is very formidable, for it con–
tains the fatal bait of imitation. As Attic tragedy and comedy, ris·
ing out of the popular cults, pushed on their decline by reproduc·
ing their myths and ceremonies on the daylight stage, so the experi–
mental self-enstrangements of modem poetry undermine the
Church's overseership of that "other
'I'"
which has always accom–
panied the individual. Maritain is well alarmed; it is an invasion
of sanctity; and his efforts to halt it are backed by the
Index.
A significant detail supports the conclusion that it is the
•Poets of artisan or "cl888icist" tendencies have recently attempted to venify
Freudian, Marxian and even Social Credit themes. Such "scientific" poetry, regard!•
of the radicalism of the ideas expressed, is out of the line of the modem movement u
discussed by Maritain or in this essay; since it does not itself bear the mysteriea
of
personality, hilltory or finance but propagandizes for some formula which, presumably,
eliminates them. By dedicating itself to social groups or to education in geoeral,
poetry joins the other professions and sheds its special problems as well as its deeper
intimacy with the community.
