PARTISAN REVIEW
if I had been able to continue to exist in the "fortress of the poetic,"
I think I might have achieved something small but beautiful. Once
the barriers which divided the poetic from the unpoetic experience
had broken down every deeply felt experience had either to become
part of my poetic experience or else to destroy the poetry in me. From
now on, poetry was the test of my whole experience of life, not just
of a specially literary part of it. Poetry must enter even into my
experience of politics or be driven out by politics.
I believe that the experience I have just described is important,
bcause it
is
true also of the experience of other modern poets. One
can see fairly clearly that the development of several modern poets
is divided into three periods. A first period, when the poetry is inte–
grated within the idea of a poetic world of experiences which seem
intrinsically more poetic than other kinds of experience, and which
owe much to the memories of childhood and the literary experiences
of adolescence. Then there follows a period in which the fortress of
a poetic virginity
is
shattered, the flood gates of the world are opened
and the poet must either integrate this flood of gross, chaotic, brash
worldly experience within his work or be destroyed as a poet by it:
then there follows a period of reintegration, of building a new fortress
against the flood.
To take Yeats, Eliot and Auden, the three most significant poets
of their generations as examples, one sees each of these three stages
in different phases of their work. In Yeats the first phase is that of
the Celtic Twilight, the second that of his preoccupation with Irish
nationalism, the third the Tower: symbol of a spiritual fortress which
he constructed against the chaos of his time, from stones of mystical
philosophy, occultism and quattrocento art. In Eliot, the first phase
of a pure poetic experience is more difficult to trace: but is not the
social irony of the early Eliot a kind of skin which covers over a
very pure experience of the poetic?
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By
sea-girls wreathed with sea weed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The effort to preserve the "chambers of the sea" breaks down in
The Waste Land
and the flooding human voices have to become
the content of the poetry. The later development of Eliot is the
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