1150
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mr. Spender's language at present is simpler and stronger than in
his earlier work but it is not as inventive or selective (I doubt if the '
earlier poet would have used a cliche like "steel the wiIl," so shapeless
an adjective as "horrific" or allowed the incompatible "power" to
be
joined to "fear" and "agony"). A tendency to use words without con–
sistency either in their relations to an external world or to each other
has increased through lack of correction and also because of Mr.
Spender's failure to be content with both the limitations and possibilities
of poetry in modern society.
Whatever ultimate relation may prevail between poetry, morality
and politics, it does seem clear that at present a poet who would moralize
must either discover new moral possibilities or attempt to attract a wider
audience than the one for which modern poets habitually write. Instead,
Mr. Spender frequently goes into a self-absorbed trance in which he
lists his own moral defects and issues his old injunctions to himself. And
since he has lost his politics and finds it impossible to live and write
without some Messianic function, he has also taken to doing other
people's suffering for them, assuming the guilt of the aviators who
dropped bombs on Germany and flagellating himself because when he
was in pre-Hitler Vienna, he did not suffer enough at the sight of the
murderers.
The amazing thing about all this is that Mr. Spender's experience
of the catastrophes of contemporary Europe is more deeply felt and
poignant than that of any other English poet and he seems to be put–
ting up a great struggle in the depths of his psyche for some kind of truth
and purpose, though what its concrete realization would be is hard to
say. Covered up as it is by the ragged remnants of the Shelleyan suffer–
ing-prophet tradition, often mawkish and clumsy in expression, crossed
by a streak of naive schoolboy idealism maintained so long that it has
gone a trifle rotten, Mr. Spender's struggle with urgent matters never–
theless gives the verse in "The Edge of Being" a distorted and muffled
power that is duplicated nowhere else in contemporary poetry.
Mr. Cahoon's poetry is, whether consciously or not I do not know,
exquisitely adapted to the contradictions of the ' poet's current situation.
As I see it, most of the old kind of poetic energy is being shut off and
no great supply of new energy is available or will be unless something
changes inside the poet, the form of poetry or the poet's relation to
society. Meanwhile Mr. Cahoon has given us a volume of verse that is
about as de-energized as poetry of merit can be, by which I do not mean
that it is fatigued but that it is confined, diminished writing from which
