110
they are regarded as literary critics,
though with alarm certainly when
they are taken as political symp–
toms), but rather such men as
Winters, Tate, Ransom, and Black–
mur (there is a host of small fry
swimming in the wake of these),
who have resolutely set themselves,
to a great extent, against any sort
of free-flowing lyricism and have
encouraged a certain pseudo-clas–
sical and/or-"traditional" rigidity
-neither truly classical nor genu–
inely traditional. I would say vvith–
out hesitation-despite the obvi–
ously great .perceptivity and sensi–
tivity of some of these men, and
the undoubted services some of
them have done us (I am thinking
especially of Winters and his re–
covery and discovery of so many
otherwise buried poems, both of
the English sixteenth century and
of the American twentieth centu–
ry)-that these critics have had a
very bad influence upon American
writing, discouraging exploration
and experimentalism and encour–
aging an adherence (disgusting in
its timidity) to a very watered-
<>Wn version of "tradition" indeed.
Not that, as Michael Fraenkel once
pointed out to me, it is likely that
any
first-rate
writer was lastingly af–
fected by them, but that many who
would otherwise have been good
second or third-rate writers (or
rather, to avoid the unpleasant
connotations of this "rate" talk,
good
minor
writers) have been
constricted and choked to unread–
ability by the pronouncements
(backed by God knows what in–
credible prestige) of these critics.
But-after all!-it's probably
PARTISAN REVIEW
wrong to blame the Cult of Sobrie–
ty critics as if they were the cause
of the bleakness, the lack of
warmth, of so much American po–
etry nowadays. They are sympto–
matic, as is the poetry itself. It may
be reasonable to expect the poets
to be a little more alive than most
people, even in
this
frozen deadly
time (and as a matter of fact many
of them are-a
little
more alive!–
but what a little!) but when a
whole world society is frozen, inex–
pressive, mechanical-and conse–
quently more explosively aggressive,
more incredibly destructive than
ever before--how can we expect
warm living
poetry
or anything else
warm and alive, except from the
tiniest minority of rebels, the few
men and women here and there
who still refuse to be bound into
strait jackets?
The fact that the French poems
one sees nowadays seem to
be
a
little more alive and flowing is
probably not so much due to a
different critical situation as to the
traditionally greater aliveness of
the French (not at all illusory, I
believe: even in the thrqes of
fi–
nance capitalism at its worst the
French never froze over like most
of the Americans did) and to the
rebound from the extreme dangers
of the war and the occupation (I
think the Existentialists' analysis is
quite correct here: being con–
fronted with death,
if
one doesn't
crack from the extreme anxiety
one rebounds even more strongly
into livingness).
jACKSON MAcLow
Bearsville, N. Y.
