68
PARTISAN REVIEW
Welsh and Irish and Norse poets, the poets of a hundred barbarous
cultures, loved nothing so much as referring to the very dishes on the
table by elaborate descriptive epithets-periphrases, kennings-which
their hearers had to be specially educated to understand. (Loved nothing
so much, that is, except riddles.) And just consider the amount of clas–
sical allusions that those polite readers, our ancestors, were expected
to recognize-and did recognize.
If
I recite to you,
The brotherless
H eliades
/
Melt in such amber tears as these,
many of you will
think,
Beautiful;
a good many will think,
Marvell;
but how many of you will
know to whom Marvell is referring?
Yet the people of the past were not repelled by this obscurity
(seemed, often, foolishly to treasure it); nor are those peoples of the
present who are not so far removed from the past as we: who have pre–
served, along with the castles, the injustice, and the social discrimination
of the past, a remnant of its passion for reading poetry.
It
is hard to be
much more difficult than Mallarme; yet when I went from bookstore
to bookstore in Paris hunting for one copy of Corbiere, I began to feel
a sort of mocking frustration at the poems by Mallarme, letters by
Mallarme, letters to Mallarme, biographies of, essays on, and homage
to Mallarme with which the shelves of those bookstores tantalized
me. For how long now the French poet has been writing as if the
French public did not exist-as if it were, at best, a swineherd dreaming
of that faraway princess the poet; yet it looks at him with traditional
awe, and reads in dozens of literary newspapers, scores of literary maga–
zines, the details of his life, opinions, temperament and appearance.
And in the Germanic countries people still glance at one with attentive
respect, as if they thought that one might at any moment be about to
write a poem; I shall never forget hearing a German say, in an objective
considering tone, as if I were an illustration in a book called
Silver Poets
of the Americas:
"You know, he looks a little like Rilke." In several
South American countries poetry has kept most of the popularity and
respect it formerly enjoyed; in one country, I believe Venezuela, the
president, the ambassador whom he is sending to Paris, and the waiter
who serves their coffee will four times out of five be poets. "What sort
of poetry do
these
poets write?" is a question of frightening moment for
Northern poets; if the answer is, "Nice simple stuff," we shall need to
question half our ways. But these poets, these truly popular poets, seem
to have taken as models for their verse neither the poems of Homer, of
Shakespeare, nor of Racine, but those of Pablo Picasso: they are all
surrealists.
Is
Clarity the handmaiden of Popularity, as everybody automatically
