70
PARTISAN REVIEW
only this time with reference to the poetry of William Wordsworth.
We cannot even be sure what people will find obscure; when I
taught at Salzburg I found that my European students did not find
"The Waste Land" half so hard as Frost's poetry, since one went with,
and the other against, all their own cultural presuppositions; I had not
simply to explain "Home-Burial" to them, I had to persuade them that
it was a poem. And another example occurs to me: that of Robert
Hillyer. The first reviews of
The Death of Captain N emo
that I saw
began by complaining that the poem was obscure. I feIt as if I had seen
Senator McCarthy denounced as a Soviet agent; for how could Mr.
Hillyer be obscure?
That the poet, the modern poet, is, understandably enough, for all
sorts of good reasons, more obscure than even he has any imaginable
right to be-this is one of those great elementary (or, as people say
nowadays,
elemental)
attitudes about which it is hard to write anything
that is not sensible and gloomily commonplace; one might as well talk
on faith and works, on heredity and environment, or on that old ques–
tion: why give the poor bathtubs when they only use them to put coal
in? Anyone knows enough to reply to this question: "They don't; and
even if they did,
that's
not the reason you don't want to help pay for
the tubs." Similarly, when someone says, "I don't read modern poetry
because it's all stuff that nobody on earth can understand," I know
enough to be able to answer, though not aloud:
"It
isn't; and, even if
it were,
that's
not the reason you don't read it." Any American poet
under a certain age, a fairly advanced age-the age, one is tempted to
say, of Bernard Shaw-has inherited a situation in which no one looks
at him and in which, consequently, everyone complains that he is invisi–
ble: for that corner into which no one looks is always dark. And people
who have inherited the custom of not reading poets justify it by referring
to the
obscurity
of the poems they have never read-since most people
decide tha t poets are obscure very much as legislators decide that books
are pornographic: by glancing at a few fragments someone has strung
together to disgust them. When a person says accusingly that he can't
understand Eliot, his tone implies that most of his happiest hours are
spent at the fireside among worn copies of the
Agamemnon, Phedre,
and the Symbolic Books of William Blake; and it is melancholy to find,
as one commonly will, that for months at a time he can be found pushing
eagerly through the pages of
Worlds in Collision
or
The Cardinal,
where
with head, hands, wings, or feet
this poor fiend
pursues his way, and
swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies;
that all his happiest mem–
ories of Shakespeare seem to come from a high-school production of
