THE OBSCURITY OF THE POET
71
As You Like It
in which he played the wrestler Charles; and that he
has, by some obscure process of free association, combined James Russell,
Amy, and Robert Lowell into one majestic whole: a bearded cigar-illlok–
ing ambassador to the Vatican who, after accompanying Theodore
Roosevelt on his first African expedition, came home to dictate from
his
deathbed the "Concord Hymn." Many a man, because Ezra Pound is
too obscure for him, has shut forever the pages of
Paradise
Lost;
or so
one would gather, from the theory and practice such people combine.
The general public (in this lecture I hardly speak of the happy few,
who grow fewer and unhappier day by day; the relative isolation of the
American intellectual is as much a disaster for him as it
is
for his society)
has set up a criterion of its own, one by which every form of contem–
porary art is condemned. This criterion is, in the case of music, melody;
in the case of painting, representation; in the ease of poetry, clarity.
In each case one simple aspect is made the test of a complicated whole,
becomes a sort of loyalty oath for the work of art. Although judging
by
this method is almost as irrelevant as having the artist pronounce
shib–
boleth,
or swear that he is not a Know-Nothing, a Locofocoist, or a Bull
Moose, it is as attractive, in exactly the same way, to the public that
judges: instead of having to perceive, to enter, and to interpret those
new worlds which new works of art are, the public can notice at a glance
whether or not these pay lip-service to its own "principles," and can then
praise or blame them accordingly. Most of the music of earlier centuries,
of other continents, has nothing the ordinary man can consider a satis–
factory melody; the tourist looking through the galleries of Europe very
soon discovers that most of the Old Masters were not, representationally
speaking, half so good as the painters who illustrate
Collier's Magazine;
how difficult and dull the inexperienced reader would find most of the
great poetry of the past, if he could ever be induced to read it! Yet it is
always in the name of the easy past that he condemns the difficult
present.
Anyone who has spent much time finding out what people do when
they read a poem, what poems actually mean for them, will have dis–
covered that a surprising part of the difficulty they have comes from
their almost systematic unreceptiveness, their queer unwillingness to
pay attention even to the reference of pronouns, the meaning of the
punctuation, which subject goes with which verb, and so on; "after
all," they seem to feel, "I'm not reading
prose."
You need to read good
poetry with an attitude that is a mixture of sharp intelligence and of
willing emotional empathy, at once penetrating and generous: as if you
were listening to
The Marriage of Figaro>
not as if you were listening to
