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PARTISAN REVIEW
their heads. But do you know and feel this: that in every town of
France is a secret young man who would let himself be chopped to
pieces for you and your verses. You are his pride, his mystery, his
vice. He isolates himself from all in this unshareable love and in the
confidence of your work, difficult to come by, to understand, and
to defend.... "
This kind of audience-relationship is certainly one of the condi–
tions of our society, and there is inherent in it a special sort of anxiety,
which is always to some extent subjective and unconscious since lan–
guage cannot perfectly explicate all of the conditions under which it
exists at the moment of its use. Thus the anxiety of the Romantic
audience-relationship, with its peculiarly intimate and pervasive
influence, sometimes brings into relief, but also often intensifies to the
point of blind insistence, the universal death-anxiety and anxiety over
the evil conditions of society.
