544
PARTISAN REVIEW
and especially to the manner of Khlebnikov, is his conception and
treatment of the word. While the typical decadent or symbolist poet
seems to control the music of language by yielding to it, Pasternak
masters his medium by doing violence to the very nature of poetic
speech. His idiom is like a mosaic made of broken pieces. The frag–
ments are shapeless, and
if
they ultimately fit within the pattern
of a line, or within the design of a poem, it is only because of the
poet's will. The cement holding them together is either syntax or
rhythm, more frequently both. From his early beginnings, Pasternak
tightened the syntax of Russian poetic speech as no modern poet had
ever done. At the same time, in reaction against both the vagueness
of late symbolistic verse, which was a kind of
veTS lib
ere,
and the
declamatory effusions of
veTS libTe,
characteristic of Mayakovsky and
his followers, he chose to use, with strictness and rigor, regular and
even closed metrical forms. In doing so he succeeded in reconciling
within his poetry the demands of both the old and the new. Like
all
the most successful figures of the avant-garde, Pasternak (who
is
its only surviving representative in Russia today) was thus able
to prove that tradition also must playa role in the revolutions of art.
There is an obvious parallel between this historical function and
the internal structure of the poetry of Pasternak. With terms taken
from the vocabulary of our "New Critics," one could say that
his
verse constantly aims at tension and paradox. His poems are equally
ruled by passion and intelligence, or rather, -by a reciprocal interplay
of emotion and wit. This
is
why Prince Mirsky compared him to
John Donne, by which that critic probably meant that Pasternak's
poetry
is
"metaphysical" not in the original, but in the modem and
revived sense of that term. Yet his work is better understood if placed
within the immediate and local tradition from which it sprang.
H
we do so, we may find that the concept of "transmental poetry"
is
the frame of reference we need. In their attempt to create a
poetry
purely verbal in essence, some of the so-called Cubo-Futurists wrote
poems in what they called "transmental language," or in newly
coined words without meaning, and with no other semantic value
than that of their sound effect& The experiment was bound to fail:
poetry can never become, at least in the sense that painting or sculp–
ture can, an abstract art. Poetry cannot but be either expressionistic
or ideational; and Pasternak made {loetry, so to say, non-representa-
