PARTISAN REVIEW
is obscure and can be tracked down, as in most
good
modem poetry;
it is that the very concussion of false meanings produces an emotion of
exaltation. And if this is the result of ignorance, it is also the result of an
infatuation with language, a mastery of versification as such, and the
true possession of certain emotions such as exaltation. When Crane
seeks to force some insincere feeling into his words, the forcing and the
falseness come through immediately. By comparing the passages of
genuine emotion with those which are false, we can see how inexact it
is to dismiss Crane's poetry as mere mystification : it had to be self–
mystification first of all:
Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the
severe
Chilled albatross's white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality akme
Through clay aflow immortally to you.
Here again one can question the denotative meaning of every line. But
the sympathetic reader can hardly miss the declaration of love which
the words contain. Some strange and complicated feeling for the con–
notations of words has made possible this kind of poetry. It can be com–
pared to incantation-"the use of spells or verbal charms, spoken or
sung,"-and it can be compared to music (if one remembers that it is
not the
sound
of the words so much as the associations of meaning which
the words evoke that justify the musical comparison). But perhaps it
should be unnecessary to say that this kind of poetry is an extreme made
possible only by raw genius, ignorance, and self-delusion. Ignorance and
self-delusion alone would not have sufficed, of course.
Bu~
if this were
the only kind of poetry most poetry would not be worth reading.
Delmore Schwartz;
ADJUSTING HAMLET
HAMLET. By Williom Shokespeore. With
11
psycho·anolytical study by
Ernest Jones M.D. Funk
&
Wagnalls. $2.50.
There was an eighth-grade teacher who used to urge us to con–
sider what Lady Macbeth would have been like if she had not married
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