126
Pilgrim to Philistia
I
F Karl Shapiro's
Essay on Rime
(Reyna[
&
Hitchcock.
$2) were
an isolated phenomenon, one could
dismiss it simply as an unfortunate
misadventure of a gifted young
poet in a didactic genre he of all
poets should never have attempted.
But it is not isolated, and has there–
fore to be examined as the child
of the
Zeitgeist
that it is. Shapiro
seems determined to be a straw in
every fashionable wind: here is
the new distrust of the dissident in–
tellectual, of science, of the critic,
of the difficulty of modern liter–
ature; and here too the misty wind
of the vague new religiosity. Stat–
ing that his purpose is to "help
solidify / The layman's confidence
in a plainer art," Shapiro has
written what amounts to an attack
on all of modern literature: an–
other manifesto in the anti-modern–
ist movement of o;ganized Philistia.
And its public will have its book.
Already saluted in an inexplicable
review by F. 0. Matthiessen in the
Times Book Review,
it now needs
only one of Mr.
J.
Donald Adams'
inimitable Sunday morning sermons
to be properly launched on its
career as a club over the heads of
other writers, over modern poetry
generally.
After charging blithely through
the modern confusions in metre,
rhythm, rhetoric and language,
Shapiro prepares to plunge in the
last section of his poem at a more
terrifying windmill: the · whole in–
tellectual situation of the modern
PAR T ISAN R EV I EW
writer. The reader, slightly winded
from the previous demolitions, sits
up again: here perhaps come the
great deliverances, the resolving
truths! After all, this section is
labelled the modern "Confusion in
Belief" (a confusion which arises,
Shapiro thinks, fundamentally from
the modern "failure in belief'),
and shouldn't we expect that the
man bold enough to pronounce the
confusion and dissect the failure be
able to restore order and success–
ful functioning?
Shapiro attacks the modern poet
for believing in, among other
things, Psychoanalysis, Economics,
Sociology, Freud, and Marx.
Failure of belief! One would think
this an excess, rather than a
failure, in belief. But inconsistency
is no hobgoblin to Shapiro's mind.
The inconsistencies themselves
would not matter so much if he
were not dealing with a subject so
large as the intellectual situation
of modern man and showing him–
self at the same time incapable of
ideas. It is not that Shapiro does
not respond at all to ideas; he
would not have been attracted
otherwise into this intellectual
jungle; there are good writers who
are not touched at all by ideas,
but Shapiro is not one of these. He
is something much more impure:
he responds to ideas, but he does
not have them; what he has are
half-ideas, vapors of ideas, approx–
imations to ideas- to which incon–
sistency probably never struck him
as particularly relevant, and per–
haps isn't. Shapiro is attacking, of
course, not a modern "failure in
