STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
for the latest word from Paris-and so on. Each classification has its
sages, managers, and impresarios. Naturally, the lines of separation
are not sharply drawn (without simplifying the situation it would be
impossible to describe it) and there is considerable overlapping. Yet
everybody knows more or less where he belongs, and lines himself up
and acts accordingly. What matters is where you wish to place your–
self in the struggle for reputation, not what you burn to say.
The avantgarde has been allowed to freeze itself into such a
standardized repertory of attitudes because of the absence of new
challenges to itself within the field of experience. On the one side it
is faced with political crisis, on the other with the increasing aggres–
siveness and the expansion of middlebrow culture. Both together work
to stop the progress of bourgeois culture as a whole toward new ex–
perience--one by making its vanguard timid, and the other by forc–
ing it to wait upon backwardness and cultural demagoguery.
Literary rediscovery has always been a part of avantgarde
activity, which insists traditionally on making revaluation a constant
and permanent process. That revivals now figure so prominently in
publishing only shows the extent to which avantgarde practices have
been taken over by official culture. One could say that revivals really
began when Stendhal predicted his own discovery (not rediscovery) .
But didn't Dryden rediscover Chaucer? I feel, however, that the mod–
ern precedent was set by the Germans when they rediscovered Hold–
erlin and Kleist around the turn of the century.
It would appear true that the poetry of the past has a diminishing
audience; Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth do not seem to be read by
anywhere near as large a proportion of the cultivated public as they
used to
be.
But the popularity of contemporary poetry increases
steadily and increases phenomenally, and the successful poet still
dominates the literary and academic scene, even
if
he is not read
by as many people as the novelist is. It strikes me as ri.*y to say that
poetry has had "an ever diminishing audience" in recent years.
The criticism that concentrates itself on the close analysis of poe–
try is by and large an American phenomenon and a concomitant,
among other things, of the store we set by techniques and of our
concern with the statement of procedures. This criticism has illumin–
ated much but it has also darkened much, shutting out both air and
877
