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PARTISAN REVIEW
the politics, and the magic are conceived, through the personalities that
reflected them, with an increasing unity of apprehension. Thus more
than any poet of our time he has restored to poetry the actual emotions
of race and religion and what we call abstract thought. Whether we
follow him in any particular or not, the general poetic energy which
he liberated is ours to use if we can.
When it comes to Eliot's poetry, he thinks the readers do not accept
the religious ideas literally, as did Eliot himself, but only as selVing the
imaginative structure of the poems; and as for the critics, or possibly
it is for the readers too, "Our labor is to recapture the imaginative
burden and to avoid the literal like death." The language in these pas–
sages is serious and eloquent; they do not have that quirky verbal play
which makes his mean style so individual. But the stakes are high;
he is repudiating the ideas as ideas, and reckoning their usefulness for
the poem. He speaks of the "intolerable disorder" of the times, and
requires "intelligence" to supply the pattern which will order it at
least in the poem. The poet Cummings is studied scornfully as a mem–
ber of the "anti-culture group"; which always works by "a sentimental
denial of the intelligence." A frequent term is "rational imagination,"
meaning the ordering imagination which controls sensibility; and about
D. H. Lawrence he declares: "No objection will be offered to the view
of life involved . . . only regret that it could not succeed"; could
not succeed in Lawrence's poems; for not being formed by a rational
imagination. He says of Hopkins and Emily Dickinson:
If
their poems sometimes confront the supersensible-and they mostly
do not-it is always on the plane of the rational imagination, never
in the incomprehensible terms of the mystical act.
No reproach is lodged against the mystical act in itself; but it is not
serviceable for the poem.
I will cite just one more text:
Poetry does not flow from thin air but requires always either a literal
faith, an imaginative faith, or, as in Shakespeare, a mind full of many
provisional faiths.
The passage goes on to say that the religious standard is higher for
serious art than for common life. I think that must be so. But would
not the sentence have read well before it came to its official place if
the subject "Poetry" had not been there, but the subject "The good
')
life"?
It
would have been pleasant that way; an affirmation with a
cheery protestant clang. Probably it would have been subscribed to by
the most dissident of all the dissenters in Christendom. But not by
everybody. Perhaps by everybody who could read modern poetry.
