THE OBSCURITY OF THE POET
Walk in all day (to try me) without knocking–
My jurors: these just, vulgar, friendly shades.
The cutting garden of my grandmama,
My great-great-great-grandfather's padded calves
(Greeted, at cockcrow, with the soft small smile
Of Lilith, his first morganatic wife)
Are only a tale from E. T . W. Hoffmann.
When Art goes, what remains is Life.
The World of the Future do es not work by halves:
Life is that "Wine like Mother used to make–
So rich you can almost cut it with a knife."
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The World of the Future! The world where vegetables are either
frozen, canned, or growing in the fields; where little children, as they
gaze into the television viewplate at the Babes dead under the heaped-up
leaves of the Wood, ask pleadingly: "But where was their electric
blanket?"; where old books, hollowed-out to hold fudge, grace every
coffee-table; where cavemen in grammar school pageants, clad in pelts of
raw cotton, are watched by families dressed entirely-except for the Neo–
lite of their shoe-soles- in rayon, cellulose and spun nylon; where,
among the related radiances of a kitchen's white-enameled electric
stove, electric dishwasher, electric refrigerator, electric washing-machine,
electric dryer, electric ironer, disposal unit, air conditioner, and Waring
Blender, the homemaker sits in the trim coveralls of her profession;
where, above the concrete cavern that holds a General Staff, the rockets
are invisible in the sky. . . . Of this world I often think.
I do not know whether, at this point, any of my hearers will feel
like saying to me, "But all this is negative. What do you want us to
do
about all this?"
If
I have sounded certain about "all this," remember
that this is the way helpless conviction necessarily must sound, if it
knows no other way of writing; all thcse are conclusions which I have
come to slowly and reluctantly, as the world forced them on me. Would
that I were one of those happy reactionaries, born with a Greek
vocabulary as other children are born with birthmarks or incomes, who
at the age of four refuse indignantly to waste on that "humanitarian
phantasy of a sentimentai liberalism, the Kindergarten," the hours they
instead devote to memorizing their catechism! But I had a scientific
education and a radical youth; am old-fashioned enough to believe, like
Goethe, in Progress-the progress I see and the progress I long for and
do not see. So I say what I have said about the poet, the public, and
their world angrily and unwillingly.
If
my hearers say, "But what should
