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PARTISAN REVIEW
not be that Walt Whitman's cycle is still open? and that here, too,
poetry is the field of true originality?
South America suggests a curious speculation which has its bear–
ing upon cultural inheritances. It is a problem which concerns the in–
dividual in his laboratory as well as the collective life of a people or
a nation. Many of the myths are disappearing in Europe. There is no
doubt that something came to an end with Joyce, just as, earlier,
something ended with Proust. Both of these authors closed cycles
which will never be opened again. And now, while the new era
is
beginning (or perhaps not beginning ) , we have with us certain writers
who counterfeit a continuance of the old-the most characteristic
of these being Paul Valery. But this fictive survival, with its 'empirical
empyreans,' deceives only the simple-minded. The destructive ten–
dencies ravaging the younger generation in Europe are greeted with
a half-smile by the experienced, who know that no continuity is pos–
sible, that something has been broken, and that we must begin all
over again, naked feet firm upon the naked ground.
At the same time, these 'destructive' influences are received
in
South America as naturally as a forest enriches itself with dead leaves.
And there is nothing more curious than the fragrance which old
tormented Europe takes on
in
the poetry of the Mexican
L6pe~
Velarde, for instance, and the Peruvian Cesar Vallejo: dead youths
surrounded by their treasure: the first with his stormy, primitive sen–
suality, and Vallejo with his asceticism, also traditional, in which we
come upon tidy deserts, dry river-beds of stone predicting cloudbursts
whose very absence makes them more actual than their actuality. In
these two poets, so different, we find all the elegant decadence of
Europe-we could localize it, trait by trait; and yet, not only does it
not decline in them, but it takes on an affirmative, rising tone. The
same is true of Pablo Neruda, although his technic
is
still different.
As
for the North Americans, I unfortunately know too little English
to be able to speak of them from direct experience; but what I have
been able to discover leads me to believe that they manifest a similar
phenomenon. And if this is so, is not the United States, like Mexico
and Argentina, living in the age of the rhapsodists? And may not
this
be the rea<;on why the miracle of inheritance is more clearly evident
on this continent than elsewhere?
In the novel, we saw that the greatest works are following in
the tracks of European naturalistic psychologism and impressionism
without adding anything that
is
substantially American. Is not the
case different with poetry? Is not a rich, poetic American mythology,
