214
PARTISAN REVIEW
moments ("Absence is your smiling to the skies ... "; "the chill dawn's
feeling of utter agony grappling against the hard hailing stars ... ").
As far as I am concerned, heaven is exactly where it was before.
No doubt this is part of that rising resort to religion about which
PR has been so exercised during the past year. There is certainly no
doubt that it is becoming the big gun of poetic consolation: it is entirely
possible that Eliot's
Four Quartets
may set a pattern as
The Waste Land
did twenty years ago.
If
so, I think it will be unfortunate: not because
I do not respect Eliot's poem, but because I think its central experience
is essentially less accessible than that of
The Waste Land.
My own guess
is that a capacity for original religious experience is a talent as peculiar
as musical genius, and probably rarer. Of poets with the . true religious
talent, there have been two kinds: the pure and confident mystics, like
Vaughan and Blake; and the aspirers-like Donne, and, I should think,
Eliot today-who make their poems out of their struggle to achieve
"a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything."
There remain those who are convinced by the argument, or by any other
pressures. They may still be unobjectionable as poets provided that they
do not try to fake the religious emotion. But with poetry as with women's
dresses, that fashion is dangerous which few are equipped to follow with
any success.
By contrast the simple hope in the future of the common man seems
a relief. Reading Idris Davies'
The Angry Summer,
one remembers how
rare a proletarian poem is in these days. The prophets of a decade ago–
Day Lewis and Auden, for example-are dumb, or whoring after strange
gods; and fellow traveling is distinctly not in style. Hence
The Angry
Summer
is today a distinct sport: it is a series of fifty short poems about
the coal strike in the Welsh valleys in 1926. I find it oddly effective and
moving, though it is not easy to say why. The propaganda is overt, the
techniqu~
is comparatively naive, the epithets are always the expected
ones, or at least what
were
the expected ones before poets learned not
to
use them. Some of the simple and blunt words now begin to seem
novel and refreshing:
The sleek one,
The expert at compromise
Is bowing in Whitehall.
And lackey to fox to pa'o/ot cries:
'The nation must be saved'.
But of course more important than the diction is the fact that the poem
has direction, drive, and guts. It is saved from the black and white stiff–
ness of straight propaganda poems by its clear love for and pride in the
Welsh land and people; and in his concern for these things Davies forgets
himself entirely.
Some of the same things apply to Bertolt Brecht's short radio play
now published here by New Directions, though
The Trial of Lucullus
is
