THE PROFESSION OF POETRY
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the fools and pedants and reformers of the world that our only obliga–
tion is to condemn them, ,to draw apart into rapture-the reader is asked
to wash his hands of them, and to become part of the sanctimonious
anarchic ecstasy of the poem. The poet has made a separate peace;
sitting among the lakes and flowers of a Swiss summer, he complacently
dismisses the fools killing each other below, people who have never even
realized that love is enough. I have heard only once his recording of
his poem about the soldier from New York City who is killed by steel
from the Sixth Avenue Elevated; but I shall never forget the firm
superiority, the confident rejection of the voice as it said that you and
I told him, Christ told him, Socrates told him, and he wouldn't listen;
but part of the old Sixth Avenue Elevated, in a Japanese
shell-that
made him listen.... Yes, Christ and Socrates did tell him (though it is
odd to see that old soldier Socrates in this particular connection), and
he didn't listen; but they told you and me and Mr. Cummings this and
many other things, and we listened to few and lived by fewer. In the
triumph of his poems there is one thing lacking, that slave who whispers:
You too are mortal. But usually Mr. Cummings is moral about not being
conventionally moral: he resembles a student of ethics who, after reading
that some tribes feed the old and others eat them, decides that it is all
right to do anything anywhere, that the self-expression of the knowing
superior is the one true key to ethics-and from then on he looks with
pharisaical impatience at those not elect, weak spirits caught in the
bloody toils of morality.
The poems' relation to "Nature" is impressive in its purity and
delight, but depressing in its affinity to that of picture-postcards; and
Love, in the poems, is so disastrously neo-primitive, has been swept so
fantastically clean of complication or pain or moral significance, that it
seems a kind of ecstatic chocolate soda which is at once a sin-to thc
world-and a final good-to us happy few. For such poems Stendhal
and Proust (and anyone who was ever in love, one is tempted to say)
have lived and died in vain. One is bewildered by the complacency with
which the poet accepts himself and his, and rejects or doesn't even notice
the existence of the rest of the world. One of his poems lives along the
line like Pope's spider, but hides at the heart of its sensitivity a satisfied
inaccessibility to experience-for experience is, after all, what is different
from oneself. He has hidden his talent under a flower, and there it has
gone on reproducing, by parthenogenesis, poem after poem after poem.
Because of this his poems are, year after year, the same poems; the only
true changes are technical changes, ingenious discoveries exhaustively
exploited. He is like a painter who has on every canvas charming and char-
