586
PARTISAN REVIEW
before my eyes a kind of mirage of the perfection of verse drama, which
would be a design of human action and of words, such as to present at
once the two aspects of dramatic and musical order.
In this crucial passage Mr. Eliot means by "action," not Dante's
moto spintal,
which refers to every mode of the spirit's life, in response
to every "range of sensibility," but only physical movement or outward
deeds. This is the realm which he assigns to "dramatic order," and all
the rest to "musical order." By "music" he seems to mean, at this
moment, Plato's unheard
musike
which I take to be another word for
"poetry" in the widest sense. In other places he uses "music" more nar–
rowly, to mean the art which uses the medium of sound only; but the
word in that use would make no sense here. What he seems to be
saying, therefore, is that the art of drama itself is not a form of poetry;
it cannot be poetic without verse. As long as he holds that view he will,
I think, fall short of an adequate conception of poetic drama. He will
not know what to do with Ibsen and Chekhov, or, for that matter, the
prose passages in Shakespeare. And when he considers the arts of plot–
making and characterization and
dianoia
he will be at the mercy of the
engineers of the well-made play, who agree with him about the realm
of drama because, with their myopic positivism, they recognize no other
realm of human
~xperience
at all. In all of this we must recognize
the struggles of the lyric poet to understand drama as a branch of his
art, instead of lyric verse as merely one of the resources which great
dramatists can use for their wider purposes. His acceptance of drama
is thus still incomplete; yet in thirty years he has come a long way; and
his
lecture, like all his work, offers us the exhilarating spectacle of
a:
mind struggling with basic mysteries, and so always alive, changing, and
instructive.
Francis Fergusson
POUND OF FLESH
AN EXAMINATION OF EZRA POUND. Edited
by
Peter Russell. New
Directions. $4.00.
Allen Tate's essay on Pound's first thirty Cantos says that
they have the "broken flow and the somewhat elusive climax of a
good
monologue," that we return to them for "the mysterious quality of
charm" which we hear in the voice of the monologuist, and that many
