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PARTISAN REVIEW
man and beyond the Romantics to Emily Dickinson, to Yeats, to
Eliot or to Marianne Moore to see that it surely is.
The secret of voice in poetry, though a gift and an always indi–
vidual mystery, is not, however, free of circumstance-as would
seem to be the implicit assumption of so many poets today, most of
whom are still engaged in writing what R. P. Blackmur not long
ago described as "a court poetry without a court". Properly to sus–
tain the gift of poetic voice in America, if this worst abstraction of
all is to be avoided-a poetry of images without a medium, the false
concreteness of an arbitrary symbolism-would seem to require an
awareness, in the spirit though no longer in the manner of Whitman,
of the demands and pressures of our democratic conditioning. And
paradoxically enough, the democratic ethos-however inimical to
poets in other crucial respects-need not be the absolute enemy of a
poet's imagination: insofar as our conformist conditioning, with its
tendencies to assimilation and its compulsive curiosity in the 'other,'
encourages a sensitivity to speech and idiom and vocal gesture, it
may actually serve poetry, as it certainly did Whitman's. A protean
"metaphysical" tradition
in
our literature has always resisted the truth
of this paradox; Emerson was its most notable exemplar in Whitman's
time; and whenever Whitman insisted-and always vehemently–
on his essential independence from his "master," what he was really
defending, it seems to me, was precisely this original integrity of
his
poetic sensibility and his native democratic sense. Emerson, Whit–
man observed, however much he worshipped the Democracy of the
"all," could never participate in the multitudinous variety of the
American "each"-and in a single telling phrase Whitman once
epitomized Emerson's weakness: he was not an "artist
in
humanity."
For Emerson, still a Puritan
in
mind, never really knew as an
in–
tuition the insight that has enabled
Leaves of Grass
to survive as the
anthem of the modern consciousness: the simple paradox that al–
though "identity," the "soul," is the ultimate in human values, never·
theless value
to
the self, that which the self most wills and desires,
resides not
in
the depths of individual spirit, but
in
the extensional
conditioned self in the world, in "humanity." The function of
the
individual and of the poet is not, then, as Emerson thought, to create
values from spirit and to bestow these on a materially drugged world,
but to transfigure the world's values, to accomplish, in the famous
