CULTURAL ANXIETY
157
society itself may seem to vanish, while a mysterious and desperate
sensation invades the understanding-a sensation not unlike that of
being about to lose consciousness-so that in more ways than one a
poet may feel that the world is, indeed, ending and not with a bang
but a whimper. Thus a significant type of anxiety results from a
failing relationship between the poet and his audience; and since
good audiences are necessary to the welfare of society, it would appear
that this anxiety might justly be regarded as a delicate instrument
for the measurement of cultural disintegration in general. But, even
if this is so, the very delicacy of the instrument makes it almost im–
possible to read: witness the three primary poets, Yeats, Pound, and
Eliot; each of whom, being intensely aware of the difficulties be–
setting modern poetic communication, sought the image of a culture
in which those difficulties might be less.
II
In London around the year 1600, despite conventional
Renaissance talk of posterity and complaints of a lack of serious con–
temporary appreciation, court and town were too near at hand for the
poet not to be in more or less substantial relationship with both; and
the dramatist, at least, seems to have been able to write for the whole
city; "Sithence then the place (the theater) is so free in entertain–
ment, allowing a stoole as well to the Farmers sonne as to your
Templar: that your Stinkard has the selfe-same libertie to be there
in his Tobacco-Fumes, which your sweet Courtier hath: and that your
Car-man and Tinker claime as strong a voice in their suffrage, and
sit to give judgement on the plaies life and death, as well as the
prowdest Momus among the tribe of Critick." But as the city grew,
as men, to use Wordsworth's expression, "accumulated" in it, this
city-wide kind of audience disappeared. Mr. Wright says of this
London audience: "Like Shakespeare, other dramatists, especially
during the vigorous period, between 1590 and 1600, in which the
drama reached its highest development, wrote plays pleasing to every
class. Nevertheless, by the end of the sixteenth century professional
drama was beginning to show cleavage along class lines."*
*
Louis B. Wright,
Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England,
University of
North Carolina Press, 1935.
