PARTISAN REVIEW
who would so dearly have loved to be a poet and was even taken
for one by some people, was once again sitting at his desk.
As
usual
he had got up late, not until nearly twelve, after having read half
the night. Now he was sitting and staring at the place on the page
where he had stopped writing the day before. There were clever
things on that page, expressed in smooth and cultivated language,
delicate conceits, artful descriptions; many a pretty rocket and star–
shell rose from these lines and pages, many 'a tender sentiment found
expression there-and yet the writer was disillusioned by what he
read; sobered, he sat in front of what he had begun the preceding
evening with a certain joy and enthusiasm, what for the space of
an evening hour had looked like poetry and had now overnight simply
turned into literature, into miserable scribbled pages that were really
a shame.
And once again in this rather pitiful noonday hour he felt and
pondered something he had already felt and pondered many times,
namely the odd tragi-comedy of
his
position, the stupidity of his
secret pretensions to true poetry (since after all in the real world
of today true poetry did not exist and could not exist) and the
childishness and silly futility of his efforts, prompted by his love of
the old poetry and aided by his fine ear for the words of the true
poets, to try to breed something that would be equivalent to true
poetry or at any rate would look enough like it to be mistaken for it
(since he knew quite well that from education and imitation nothing
whatever can be bred.)
He was also partially aware that the hopeless striving and
childish illusion of
all
his efforts were by no means an isolated and
personal phenomenon, but that every man, even the apparently
normal, even the apparently happy and successful, nourishes within
himself exactly the same foolish and hopeless self-deception, that
every man strives constantly and incessantly after something impos–
sible, that even the most ill-favored carries within him the ideal of
Adonis, the most stupid, the ideal of the sage, the poorest, the aspira–
tion to be Croesus. Yes, he actually half knew that even the so greatly
venerated ideal of "pure poetry" amounted to nothing, that Goethe
had looked up to Homer and Shakespeare just as hopelessly as an
author of today might perhaps look up to Goethe, and that the con–
ception of "poet" was only a lovely abstraction, that even Homer
and Shakespeare had been only men of letters, gifted specialists who
