STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
Here we come hard on the sixth question; the remarks above
in their various ways all marshall themselves about it. The
"new
criticism" naturally concentrated upon the analysis and interpreta–
tion of poetry because the language of the poetry itself was, like the
elite who wrote it, self-elected; because its character was highly
experimental in language and form; and because, so to speak,
its
authors were internal free-lancers-without adequate relation to the
society of which they expressed the substance more and more as an
aesthetic
experience. (I duck the relation of this to poetry's "ever–
diminishing audience," because I am not sure we have not merely
returned, for the kind of court poetry we write, to the audience
which preceded the era of universal education, and I suspect that
audience is larger, not smaller, than it used to be. We have not been
able
to turn up any poetry to go with the new situation;
it
is either
a failure or-more likely-a difference in our cultural structure.)
It
would seem to me that, just as the practice of writers now forces
them to experiment with the very substance of their work, so criticism
ought to analyze and elucidate, ought somehow to get at and bring
to judgment of maximum knowledge, what is going on in these deep
experiments at bringing the substance of culture to aesthetic ex–
pression. To the degree that critics become conscious of the job,
they will transpose their skills to such a purpose. Re-examination is
a perpetual need, since what is examined turns always a new face.
It is only one aspect of that face-and by no means surely the
Medusa face-that shows through the tension between Soviet com–
munism and ourselves. So far as we make it seem more than one
aspect, or make it the dominant face, we create a swindling chasm
between ourselves and our common enterprise; and so far as we do
that, we cannot handle the tension except by forcing it to that crisis
of which the cost is "not less than everything." That extravagance is
the swindle, and it seems to me we tend to that extravagance because
we do not understand our own culture very well, and do not know
to what
it
is we are committed. To find out is partly our job.
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