IN THE SACRED PARK
95
ent even in his mode of correcting his poems. But our point here is
that the rejection of poetry as "work" may very well have another
meaning than that of limiting it in relation to life.
I will even venture to say that the amateur poet
is
actually
closer to the total poet than the professional poet can be. Hoelderlin
called poetry the most innocent as well as the most dangerous of ac–
tivities. He left out of account altogether those matters of technique
which the professional poet always makes supreme. Conceiving poetry
in Hoelderlin's terms, we can at once locate the figure of Wallace
Stevens at one of the poles of the definition cited; Stevens chose to
emphasize that aspect of poetry which makes it the most innocent
of activities.
But
if
poetry is also the most dangerous of activities, this is be–
cause it treats of the sacred.
If
we now want to compare the three
attitudes toward poetry we have so far discussed, we can do no better
than describe their relation to the sacred. The total poet will treat
of the sacred directly; not merely of what is sacred to him, but of
what is sacred to other men as well. The professional poet delimits
the sacred within his own professional sphere; poetry for him be–
comes the sacred and also
the only means of access to it;
thus the
professional poet's contact with the sacred separates him from other
men.
2
And the amateur poet? Let us not conclude too quickly that
nothing is sacred to him, for then he would not even be an amateur
poet, he would not be a poet at all. Though he treats of theJ sacred
only occasionally, yet like the total poet he discovers it outside and
not within
his
special sphere.
That Wallace Stevens, a secular poet if ever one were, has had
something to say about the sacred too, should be evident on reading
Sunday Morning,
one of his greatest poems:
2 Randall Jarrell is perfectly correct in charging those who condemn modern
poetry
~s
"obscure" with an incapacity to understand any kind of poetry, tra–
ditional or modern. Certainly those who do not understand Eliot are unlikely
to understand Milton, or at least certain passages in Milton. But what Jarrell
has not faced is that for the modern poet, almost always a professional, the
poem is a means of contact with a reality which the mere reader will not be
able to grasp. Even if the reader "understands" it, that is, finds what it says
intelligible, the poem will be unlikely to "save" or "redeem" him, as the mak–
ing of it "saved" and "redeemed" the poet. Now the total poet, modern or
traditional, takes for his theme that which "saves" and "redeems" and is not
restricted in its
"s~ving"
and "redeeming" to poets only.
