PARTISAN REVIEW
suggestive interaction, that they form both an aesthetic and ideational
whole, just the way a good poem does.
This does not occur in the
Cantos,
even in the use of personal
experience, in the accounts of "Ole Possum,"
"Willy,"
the "telluric
Amy," and the things they said during the years when Pound was fight–
ing from abroad the philistinism of an unregulated democracy. It is not
until the
Pisan Cantos,
so much better than the arid stretches of Chinese
and Federalist history immediately preceding them, that a significant
change occurs. The situational context, more fully and consistently
imaged, is now dramatically limited to a military prison-camp full of
Negroes, some under sentence of death, and Pound is there as a direct
consequence of his own actions. This does not affect the explicit ideas,
which remain detached and unideographic, but it does affect the sense
of the self, which is now no longer merely the superior carrier of talent
and knowledge, but as an active moral agent is inextricably involved in
the historical pattern. The result is a new humanity, tenderness, maturi–
ty, with no loss of lyric beauty or of wit. "Tard, tres tard je t'ai connue,
la Tristesse,/ I have been hard as youth sixty years."
Unfortunately nothing comparable has happened to Robinson Jef–
fers, who represents to a far more extreme degree than Pound the human
moral failures, the arrogance, the egotism, the limitation of intelligence,
the youthful hardness that prevent a genuine imaginative development.
Jeffers uses poetry simply to express an attitude; therefore the attitude
has never changed. In Jeffers' successive works we have no sense of the
way in which a poem, a true poem, once created, becomes a fact, a real–
ity, and consequently falls into dynamic relationship not only with
other existing poems, but with the kind of actual events it refers to, the
ideas it affirms or denies, and with privacies of the poet's conscious and
unconscious mind. These privacies the poem not so much expresses as
shapes into a meaningful combination which is a discovery, and a point
of departure for new discoveries. The direction of future discovery
is determined by the tensions, the coherences and incompatibilities which
the preceding poems, by their very existence, have brought into being for
the poet. This is the experimental sequence which explains the creative
development of most of the major writers.
Jeffers, however, in his youth, accepting both the cosmos of nine–
teenth century materialism and the theological warning of the human
consequences of such an acceptance, could get out of his dilemma only
by rejecting human values and human history in favor of the hawks
and the hills. He was still a part of humanity and history, though, and
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