PARTISAN REVIEW
defend the university, and granting that it easily gives shelter to
many minds that are, in the pejorative sense, academic in the extreme,
my sense of intellectual society outside the university is that it is quite
as timid and stodgy as it supposes declared academics to be, that its
attitudes are just as fixed and horrified and inelastic, although pos–
sibly its manners are a little easier.
6 and 7. For me these questions have an integral relation with
each other. The tension between Soviet Communism and the demo–
cratic countries can be understood as, among other things, an expres–
sion of a tension which exists in our culture between two radically
opposed views of man. The newspapers and the State Department
will of course pervert the nature of this tension by means of all the
gross cliches of current democratism, but we must not let this limit
and confuse our understanding of the reality of the opposition between
a simple and negative materialism and some other more complex and
more possibility-creating view which I won't undertake to give a
name to. I understand the great cultural work of the present period
to be the development and establishment of this latter view. It is
impossible for a writer with any pretensions to seriousness not to be
involved in it. I understand the critical movement you refer to as
being one of the manifestations of resistance to the simple and nega–
tive materialism which is endemic in modem materialism. Its signifi–
cance to me lies beyond any mere increase of understanding of par–
ticular literary texts; and the intensity of its effort at a time when
there is, as you say, an ever diminishing audience for poetry is a
paradigm of the cultural situation as it now exists, for I take the
intensity of its analysis and interpretation to represent its estimate, in
the face of massive resistance, of the complication, manifoldness and
possibility of the mind in the universe.
When I choose it as an example of resistance to the malign
materialism pervasive through the world and established in Soviet
Russia, I don't mean to inflate the importance of this critical move–
ment, and perhaps it will be clear that I don't in fact do so, when
I say that as an element of resistance it has not nearly done its work.
It has not made its way among the groups that might be expected
to feel its influence. Mter nearly twenty years of activity, it is still
the
new
criticism. The notion prevails that it is abstruse and special,
but this is not so; it has simply preferred to act a little haughty, a
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