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PARTISAN REVIEW
Tristan
or to Samuel Butler's Handelian oratorios; to read poetry-as
so many readers do-like Mortimer Snerd pretending to be Dr. John–
son, or like Uncle Tom recollecting Eva, is hardly to read poetry at all.
When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country
whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own;
but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's
hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its
temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that
want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each
of us who dies a natural death will die.
That the poetry of the first half of this century often
was
too dif–
ficult-just as the poetry of the eighteenth century
was
full of
antitheses, that of the metaphysicals full of conceits, that of the
Elizabethan dramatists full of rant and quibbles-is a truth that
it would be absurd to deny. How our poetry got this way-how roman–
ticism was purified and exaggerated and "corrected" into modernism;
how poets carried all possible tendencies to their limits, with more than
scientific zeal; how the dramatic monologue, which once had depended
for its effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now
became in one form or another the norm ; how poet and public stared
at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, "Since you
won't read me, I'll make sure you can't"-is one of the most complicated
and interesting of stories. But Modernism was not "that lion's den from
which no tracks return," but only a sort of canvas whale from which
prophet after prophet, throughout the late '20's and early '30's, made a
penitent return, back to rhyme and metre and plain broad Statement;
how many young poets today are, if nothing else, plain! Yet how little
posterity-if I may speak of that imaginary point where the poet and
the public intersect-will care about all the tendencies of our age, all
those good or bad intentions with which ordinary books are filled; and
how much it will care for those few poems which, regardless of intention,
manage at once to sum up, to repudiate, and to transcend both the age
they appear in and the minds they are produced by. One judges an
age, just as one judges a poet, by its best poems-after all, most of the
others have disappeared; when posterity hears that our poems are
obscure, it will smile indifferently-just as we do when we are told that
the Victorians were sentimental, the Romantics extravagant, the Au–
gustans conventional, the metaphysicals conceited, and the Elizabethans
bombastic-and go back to its (and our) reading: to Hardy's "During
Wind and Rain," to Wordsworth's story of the woman Margaret, to
Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," to Marvell's "Horatian Ode," to
