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PARTISAN REVIEW
humanism ... which seeks in the universe the exaltation of man"
-this line we have seen warped and corrupted; it now leads
nowhere. The lesser task of the poet at present is satire. But
satire cannot be asked to bear all of the weight of the diversified
and subtle modern spirit. There is another development of this
century's early period of aesthetic experiment and moral eJt·
planation. This proceeds from Rilke. "In Rilke (as opposed
to George)" writes Genevieve Bianquis, already quoted above,
"exists the most absolute abandonment to the laws of the inani·
mate; the need to unknot, to detach the bonds of the individual;
the need to love everything, to absorb everything into himseH
and to absorb himself in all; to channel toward God or toward
things all happiness, all sorrow and all emotion."-This is the
contrast between the will which builds Ages of Faith and the
act of faith itself; between compulsion and serenity, arrogance
and humility; between the raw act of force and the more com·
plex refusal of force but openness to spiritual power.
The foundation-material is ready for this tendency. The
only really usable and incontrovertible modern discoveries are
in the spiritual field; and these have their everyday diagnostic
and therapeutic uses. Truth has been told, experience under·
gone and movement undertaken-"forward" as Eliot says; but
this forward has not its old "progre3sive" connotation. The
number of individuals engaged in writing poetry of this order
will not be large, and, as is so often the case, may be unseen
by their generation. The forms will be kept clear and the
tone uninflated. No more rhetoric; no more verbalizing; no
more exhortations or elegies or eulogies. No more conscious
and affected investigations of dark corridors and deserted
3trands; no more use of the universe as a backdrop against
which one acts out hope or despair. No more dejected sitting
about. No more searching nature for an answering mood....
This exploration and movement can go on without having
to search out the folk for refreshment. The more complex
tasks have been neglected for a long time; attention to them is
overdue. Compared to these at once subtle and difficult neces–
sities the re-iterated standardized demands of the bourgeois
yearner 15ound incredibly stupid and out-dated.
