210
PARTISAN REVIEW
to each other as they were to him-may be ascribed to their lack of
culture. They had enough for private life but were unequipped for any
sort of communal life. Hegel seems to be right in his contention that one
of the aims of culture is to transform the private into the public (Kierke–
gaard notwithstanding). Another common denominator exists among
human beings, a paradoxical one, formed of that in each which is
original and private. Culture enables the individual to communicate and
appreciate inwardness, and make it objective. Whereas the failure of
individuals to express their inwardness converts them into a mass, where–
by they are denoted as having in common merely their membership in
the human species of animal--or sinner. Malaquais' loneliness stemmed
just as much from the absence of those who would have given him more
of themselves to understand as from the absence of those who would
have understood
him.
(Incidentally, the most surprising revelation in his
diary is that the French peasant is just as badly off culturally as the
Detroit factory worker.)
CLEMENT GREENBERG
POETRY IN WARTIME
WESTERN STAR.
By Stephen Vincent Benet. Farrar
&
Rinehart.
$2.50.
' NO BOUNDARY.
By Lenore G. Marshall. Henry Holt and Company.
$1.75.
AFTERNOON OF A PAWNBROKER.
By Kenneth Fearing. Harcou'T'f,
Brace.
$2.00.
CLOTH OF THE TEMPEST.
By Kenneth Patchen. Harper
&
Brothers.
$2.75.
NEW POEMS.
By Dylan Thomas. Poets of the Year Series. New Direc–
tions.
$0.50.
UNDER THE CLIFF.
By Geoffrey Grigson. George Routledge
&
Sons.
(London)
.
5s.
THE MIDDLE OF A WAR.
By Roy Fuller. The Hogarth Press
(London).
THE NARROW PLACE.
lYy
Edwin Muir. Faber
&
Faber (London).
THE ORCHESTRAL MOUNTAIN.
By
f.
F. Hendr.y. George Rout–
ledge
&
Sons (London).
5s.
THE ANGRY SUMMER.
By Idris Davies. Faber
&
Faber (London).
THE TRIAL OF LUCULLUS.
By
Bertolt Brecht (translated by H. R.
Hays). Poets of the Year Series. New Directions.
$0.50.
T
HE
styles, the forms, the personalities involved in the books listed above
run a gamut from Kenneth Patchen's unrehearsed barroom chatter
to Edwin Muir's sober if lyric lectures. Nevertheless one's final impression
is much more of sameness than of diversity. Nobody, for instance, looms
