134
PARTISAN
REVIEW
But have almost nothing to do
With the absolute flight and rest
The universal blue
And local green suggest.
This is, of course, a metaphor about human life, about relative strivings
and absolute values, about the human point of absolute values being to
keep us plugging on cheerfully with our relative strivings. Homely,
pedestrian--or should one say, of a country where nobody walks, and
the car makes Frost's metaphor unstilted, automobilian?-and a little
quaintly old-fashioned, as in the phrase "But say what Fancy will," the
poem is also very ambitious in the almost frightening clarity and sim–
plicity of its metaphysical statement. The statement, indeed, is
so
simple
and clear that one wonders for a moment whether it is just a cracker
motto, or something for the wayside pulpit, something that has strayed
from
The Readers' Digest.
It is home-made wisdom, its roots in small–
town shrewdness, not in creeds, systems, or books. All this is a purely
American combination of qualities. Auden rightly points out that "being
a poet" means in Europe being, or aiming at being, a somebody; even
I, at my very minor level of achievement, have dined with princes and
drunk my quota of champagne at embassies. The European poet-Yeats,
in love with the "big houses" and always inventing imaginary pedigrees
for himself, is a good example-thinks of himself as a kind of honorary,
or adoptive, aristocrat. "In the States," Auden rightly says, "poets have
never had or imagined they had such a status, and it is up to each
individual poet to justify his existence by offering a unique product."
Thus there are no American Donnes, Ben Jonsons, or Spensers,
with their "sons," "schools," or "families." There is very little in
America of what Hopkins called Castalian or Parnassian poetry, the
poet working with a certain confidence in a given tradition, on con–
ventional themes, in a generally accepted manner, when inspiration is
not working at full pressure. An English poem about which one feels
a little doubtful (say, some poems by Robert Bridges or Laurence
Binyon) is a sort of Royal Academy poem; an American poem about
which one feels a little doubtful (say, some poems by William Carlos
Williams) is more like a Grandma Moses poem. In the very best Ameri–
can poetry there remains a certain cranky, amateurish, hit-or-miss
quality. This disconcerts English readers (they cannot take William
Carlos Williams and in their hearts they are a little put out even by
Miss Marianne Moore), but if, since about 1945, there has been a
growing lack of sympathy between English and American readers of
