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PARTISAN REVIEW
A public resemblance, by contrast, like the resemblance of the profile
of a mountain to the profile of General Washington, exists for that
great class of people who co-exist with the great ferns in public gar–
dens, amplified music and minor education. What our eyes behold
may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and
the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure
of reality.
It quite seems as if there is an activity that makes one thing
resemble another (possibly as a phase of the police power of con–
formity). What the eye beholds may be the text of life. It is, never–
theless, a text that we do not write. The eye does not beget in resem–
blance. It sees. But the mind begets in resemblance as the painter
begets in representation, that is to say, as the painter makes his world
within a world; or as the musician begets in music, in the obvious
small pieces having to do with gardens in the rain or the fountains of
Rome and in the obvious larger pieces having to do with the sea,
Brazilian night or those woods in the neighborhood of Vienna in
which the hunter was accustomed to blow his horn and in which,
also, yesterday, the birds sang preludes to the atom bomb. It is not
difficult, having once predicated such an activity, to attribute it to
a desire for resemblance. What a ghastly situation it would be if the
world of the dead was actually different from the world of the living
and, if as life ends, instead of passing- to a former Victorian sphere,
we passed into a land in which none of our problems had been
solved, after all, and nothing resembled anything we had ever known
and nothing resembled anything else in shape, in color, in sound, in
look or otherwise. To say farewell to our generation and to look for–
ward to a continuation in a Jerusalem of pure surrealism would
account for the taste for oblivion.
The study of the activity of resemblance is an approach to the
understanding of poetry. Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for re–
semblance.
As
the mere satisfying of a desire, it is pleasurable. But
poetry if it did nothing but satisfy a desire would not rise abo\'e the
level of many lesser things. Its singularity is that in the act of satis–
fying the desire for resemblance it touches the sense of reality, it
enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it.
If
resemblance
is described as a partial similarity between two dissimilar things, it
complements and reinforces that which the two dissimilar things have
in common. It makes it brilliant. When the similarity is between
things of adequate dignity, the resemblance may be said to trans–
figure or to sublimate them. Take, for example, the resemblance
