THE
OBSCURITY OF
THE POET
75
election because you were, as I was not, born and bred in a log–
cabin, it is only a question of time until you are beaten by someone
whom the pigs brought up out in the yard. The truth that all men are
politically equal, the recognition of the injustice of fictitious differences,
becomes a belief in the fictitiousness of differences, a conviction that it
is reaction Or snobbishness or Fascism to believe that any individual
differences of real importance can exist. We dislike having to believe
in what Goethe called inborn or innate merits; yet-as a later writer
more or less says-many waiters are born with the taste of duchesses, and
most duchesses are born (and die) with the tastes of waiters: we can
escape from the level of society, but not from the level of intelligence,
to which we were born.
One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits
of the American public; it decided that 48 per cent of all Americans read,
during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader-nonreader,
rather; one man out of every two-and I reflect, with shame: "Our
poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are
Treasure Island, Peter Rab–
bit,
pornographic novels-any book whatsoever. The authors of the
world have been engaged in a sort of conspiracy to drive this American
away from books; have, in 77 million out of 160 million cases, succeeded.
A sort of dream-situation often occurs to me in which I call to this
imaginary figure, "Why don't you read books?"-and he always an–
swers, after looking at me steadily for a long time: "Huh?"
If
my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to help–
lessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the
State will not even buy breakfast-and as someone said,
"If
you're going
to hang me, you mustn't expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing
your feelings during the execution." The poet lives in a world whose
newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio
stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people,
even the capacity for understanding real poetry, real art of any kind.
The man who monthly reads, with vacant relish, the carefully pre–
digested sentences which the
Readers' Digest
feeds to him as a mother
pigeon feeds her squabs- this man
cannot
read the
Divine Comedy,
even if it should ever occur to him to try: it is too obscure. Yet one sort
of clearness shows the most complete contempt"for the reader, just as
one sort of obscurity shows the most complete respect. Which patronizes
and degrades the reader, the
Divine Comedy
with its four levels of mean–
ing, or the
Readers' Digest
with its one level so low that it seems not a
level but an abyss into which the reader consents to sink? The writer's
real dishonesty is to give an easy paraphrase of the hard truth. Yet the
