500
PARTISAN REVIEW
in poems like "The Fish" or "Roosters," because she understands so well
that the wickedness and confusion of the age can explain and extenuate
other people's wickedness and confusion, but not, for you, your own;
that morality, for the individual, is usually a small, personal, statistical,
but heartbreaking or heartwarming affair of omissions and commissions
the greatest of which will seem infinitesimal, ludicrously beneath notice,
to those who govern, rationalize, and deplore; that it is sometimes difficult
and unnatural, but sometimes easy and natural, to "do well"; that
beneath our life "there is inescapable hope, the pivot," so that in the
revolution of things even the heartsick Peter can someday find "his dread–
ful rooster come to mean forgiveness"; that when you see the snapped
lines trailing, "a five-haired beard of wisdom," from the great fish's
aching jaw, it is then that victory fills "the little rented boat," that the
oil on the bilgewater by the rusty engine is "rainbow, rainbow, rain–
bow!"-that you let the fish go.
Reading so much that is good, in this accidental three-months'
collection, has made me feel how queer it is that
our
age should have
poets like these. Why don't people admit what anybody must know: that
here and now most people can't and don't read poetry, that the stupidest
shepherd or potboy of any other age liked and understood poetry better
than the average college graduate today? What does the public do for
poets like Mr. Graves and Mr. Williams and Miss Bishop except mutter
accusingly that it "can't u1;1derstand them," neglecting to add that it
can't understand Blake or Donne or Hopkins or Shakespeare either? To–
day poetry, like virtue, is its own reward. The average reader is as likely
to understand or honor Miss Bishop or Mr. Williams or Mr. Graves
as is the average monkey ; their poems are a lonely triumph of integrity,
knowledge, and affection.
RANDALL JARRELL
CRITICISM AND COMMON SENSE
DICKENS, DALI, AND OTHERS: STUDIES IN PoPULAR CuLTURE.
By
Georg-e
Orwell. R eyna[ and Hitchcock.
$2.50.
G
EORGE ORWELL is a good,
swin~ing
critic in a familiar British tradi–
tion, the tradition of John Dennis and Dr. Johnson, of William
Gifford, of Macaulay and G.
K.
Chesterton.
It
is the tradition of "com–
monsensical" criticism, of the critical broadsword and even the battle-axe
of downrightness and plain dealing and no nonsense, of "all theory is
for it and all experience against it." We have had very few, if any, such
critics in this country, for Poe, in spite of his neurotic harshness, was
essentially of a different kidney, and
I
suppose no one would maintain
