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PARTISAN REVIEW
Cob (b) ler-he eats like a Chimneysweeper drinks like a Gingerbread
Baker and breath (e) s like Achilles.
I am inclined to believe that, as a rule, artists, even Mozart, have
not died before they have completed their work (many, of course, have
only too often gone on living and producing long after they had noth–
ing left to say). On the evidence of his letters Keats was the rare and
tragic exception of a man who died before he had found a style and
form in which he could incarnate all sides of his sensibility. One cannot
resist the temptation to speculate about what the work of his maturity
might have been. Despite his interest in drama, the times in which he
lived make it unlikely, I think, that he would have become a dramatist;
the narrative poem seems a more promising medium. The narrative
poems,
e.g. The Eve of St. Agnes,
which he did write, though beautiful
in their descriptive details, suffer from a lack of narrative and char–
acter interest; the actors and their actions are too stock. Had he lived, he
might well have learned how to use all the psychological insight, wit
and irony which his letters show him to have possessed, in writing tales
which would have made him the equal of and only successor to Chaucer.
W.
H. Auden
POLICY AND NATIONAL INTEREST
AMERICAN DIPLOMACY, 1900·1950 - AND THE CHALLENGE OF
SOVIET POWER. By George F. Kennon . University of Chicogo Press.
$2.75.
THE FORRESTAL DIARIES. By Jomes V. Forresfol. Edited by Wlliter Millis
with the colloborlltion of E. S. Duffield. Viking. $5.00.
Until rather recently, foreign policy has been on the periphery
of our national attention. For the main part of the nineteenth century,
Americans devoted themselves to political consolidation and economic
development within the nation. The very success in building up national
power had the ironic effect of thrusting the United States into the very
center of the world equilibrium of power; but the crushing international
responsibilities descended on a people intellectually and morally ill–
prepared to receive them. Only in the past decade, indeed, has the
magnitude of these responsibilities begun to be adequately recognized.
The essential problem is that foreign policy demands to be thought
about in its own way and according to its own principles. The issues of
international relations are not to be solved by simply applying prin–
ciples already developed in domestic politics or in jurisprudence or in
