TH~
OBSCURITY OF THE POET
79
with any true democracy little more than the name. Goethe said: "The
only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of
another person is love." But we can also come to terms
with
superiority,
with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can
exist; and, in doing so, we help to destroy
it
and ourselves.
I was
sorry
to see this conference given its (quite traditional) name
of The Defense of Poetry. Poetry does not need to be defended, any
more than air or food needs to be defended; poetry-using the word in
its widest sense, the only sense in which it is important-has been an
indispensable part of any culture we know anything about. Human
life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Our world today is not an impossible one for poets and poetry: poets can
endure its disadvantages, and good poetry is still being written-Yeats,
for instance, thought the first half of this century the greatest age of
lyric poetry since the Elizabethan. But what will happen to the public–
to that portion of it divorced from any real art even of the simplest
kind-I do not know. Yet an analogy occurs to me.
One sees, in the shops of certain mountainous regions of Austria,
bands of silver links, clasped in the rear like necklaces, which have at
the front jeweled or enameled silver plates, sometimes quite large ones.
These pieces of jewelry are called
goiter-bands:
they are ornaments
which in the past were used to adorn a woman's diseased, enormously
swollen neck.
If
the women who wore them could have been told that
they had been made hideous by the lack of an infinitesimal proportion
of iodine in the water of the mountain valley in which they lived, they
would have laughed at the notion. They would have laughed even more
heartily at the notion that their necks
were
hideous-and their lovers
would have asked, as they looked greedily at the round flesh under the
flaxen pigtails, how anyone could bear to caress the poor, thin, scrawny,
chickenish necks of those other women they now and then saw, foreign–
ers from that flatland which travelers call the world.
I have talked about the poet and his public; but who is his public,
really? In a story by E. M. Forster called
The Machine Stops,
there is
a conversation between a mother and her son. They are separated by
half the circumference of the earth; they sit under the surface of the
earth in rooms supplied with air, with food, and with warmth as
automatically as everything else is supplied to these people of the far
future. "Imagine," as Forster says, "a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman,
about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus." She has just
refused to go to visit her son; she has no
time.
Her son replies:
