CULTURAL ANXIETY
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his imagined audience was as vast and uncircumscribed as it was
unreal:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe .
..
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
His skylark is
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears
it heeded not.
Still hidden in the light of thought is Joyce's Stephen Daedalus,
who may be taken as the perfectly achieved type of young poet ridden
by a sense of literary doom:
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was
young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to ap–
plause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the God-damned idiot! I-Iray!
no-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for
titles. Have you read his F? 0 yes, but I prefer his Q. Yes, but W is
wonderful. 0 yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves,
deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of
the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a
few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like, Ay,
very like a whale. \,yhen one reads these strange pages of one long gone
one feels that one is at one with one who once. ...
Coleridge reports that the early audience of his friend, Words–
worth, was found "chiefly among young men of strong sensibilities
and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in
some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I
might almost say, by its religious fervour." The modern audience for
poetry is not different; unless, indeed, it has acquired even more
Romantic intensity and Romantic loneliness. Valery reports that he
once said to Mallarme in connection with that poet's intense anxiety
about his relationship to his audience: "Some blame you; others
carp at you. You irritate some; and make yourself pitied by others.
The journalist makes you the butt of his jokes, and your friends shake
