POPULAR AND UNPOPULAR ART
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ences which manage, from time to time, to bring to laudatory
view a book of gibberish? What about certain anthologists
who teeter on the verge of being members of the vanity press:
are all their contributors paid? Who is to deal with these
matters but the intellectual?
Meanwhile, the cry rises that poetry has disappeared. This
plaint often comes from the dead center, say from the core of
the Sunday book section. It rises with particular sharpness
during times of cataclysm. The middle wishes poetry to throb,
as it were, under the historic processes without a break; to light
up ambiguous terrain with continual succeeding flashes of "in–
spiration". But poetry cannot be counted upon to act as a sort
of combination faith-healing and artificial thunder and light–
ning. Poetry of the lyric order disappears for a century at a
time. It shifts. And when the formal line has in some manner
been exhausted, the vigor goes back to the base. The middle
must put up with what it has: their flabby little songs, their
attempts at reviving the "golden" American past; and their more
ambitious flights: those attempts to combine autobiography with
post hoc ergo propter hoc
comment on the world situation.
"The function of the great individual is to take up and
transform what has been communally produced". For this
function one must wait, when the folk material is in a transi–
tional or promotive phase-unmalleable and too full of its own
rough vigor to be handled and "great individuals" seem to be
lacking. Even the artist may misjudge the time. In Eliot's
Sweeney Agonistes
and
Fragment of an Agon
the two lines-of
formal treatment and "rough" material-are somehow artifi–
cially combined; the result cannot really move us. But there
are times when the poet can deal with whatever comes to hand.
And folk will not always remain ungraspable.
A few notes on the future direction of the poet:
The true hierarchic attitude as exemplified by some "in–
heritors of Symbolism" (Stefan George and to a lesser degree
Valery and Yeats) seems to be exhausted. George's "willed
rationalism toward the antique, his aesthetic and individualist
