PARTISAN REVIEW
questions. In the nineteenth century the social implications in poetry
were underestimated, and the individual work of "great poets" was
stressed-and still more their individual "inspiration." Though this
impression may still exist, nowadays it is more generally realized that
a poet cannot be explained independently from his age, and much
of the work and the "vision" that made him was the creation of
society, by a body of nameless people who played a silent part like
the nameless people who built the Gothic cathedrals. It was thanks to
their work of unaware and unconscious creation, thanks to the "cul–
ture" of the England of that time, that Shakespeare and Jonson were
possible.
Another way of approaching the same question would be to
compare the common engravings on monuments, the political state–
ments, and jottings about
affairs
of our age with those of the Eliza–
bethans.
If
we do this without any particularly expert knowledge we
certainly get an impression that in the Elizabethan period the com–
mon style was powerful and expressive. We are not pulled up by
dead words and phrases in it. We are left with a sense of life, not
with the sense of tiredness we get from the common style of today.
It seems as though an Elizabethan ordering bread or beer produced
a masterpiece which the flights of fancy of the modern rhetorician
with his lapidary words are incapable of reaching. Or again .we may
.turn to comparing domestic architecture and contrasting the Eliza–
bethan house with our modern house. For domestic architecture also
corresponds to the spirit of a time or expresses it. Do we not get an
impression that Elizabethan architecture was "organic,"
it
lived,
whereas today our architecture, usually based on stereotyped pro–
duction, lacks "organic" forms? By comparison our buildings seem
"dead." Indeed that
is
the best we can say about them. Often they
look like adorned corpses, for it
is
in decoration that the worst of
our production becomes manifest.
Each modern writer obviously tackles his problem in his own
way.
If
he
is
a novelist he may use
cliches
remorselessly with the
hope that a certain power in his content may penetrate through
them. Or he may write the spoken language while trying to eliminate
the dead material. These are both common procedures and there are
many variants. But before turning to detailed examples perhaps it
is
worth while looking back to earlier history. The Greco-Roman
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