CULTURAL EPISODE
449
taste for the life of the city and for all that the city implies of ex–
cessive complexity, of uncertainty, of anxiety, and of the demand
that is made upon intellect to deal with whatever are the causes of
complexity, uncertainty, anxiety.
I do not share this ideal. It is true that the image of the old
America has a great power over me- that old America with which
the America of Mr. Frost's poems seems to be continuous. And I
think I know from experience-there are few Americans who do
not-how intense can be the pleasure in the hills and the snow, in
the meadows and woods and swamps that make the landscape of
Mr. Frost's manifest America; and know, too, how great a part this
pleasure can play in a man's moral being. But these natural things
that give me pleasure constitute my notion of the earthly paradise,
they are not the ruling elements of my imagination of actual life.
Those elements are urban- I speak here tonight incongruously as
a man of the city. I teach in an urban university. The magazine I
most enjoy writing for is
Partisan Review,
to which, as I know, there
is often imputed an excess of city intellectuality, even to the point of
its being thought scarcely American at all.
Of course I have imagination enough to hate the city. And of
course I have sensibility enough to be bored and exasperated by the
intellectual life that is peculiar to the city, not only as that is lived
by others but by myself. But to the essential work that is done by
the critical intellect (I use the term in its widest sense), that work
which, wherever it is carried on, must sooner or later relate itself
to the metropolis or must seek, wherever it is carried on, to create
around itself the intensity and variety that traditionally characterize
the intellectual life of the metropolis- to that work I give a partisan
devotion. I know all that can be charged against the restless, com–
bative, abstract urban intellect: I know perhaps more than is known
by its avowed antagonists. I also know that when it flags, something
goes out of the nation's spirit, and that if it were to cease, the state
of the nation would be much the worse.
It is a fact which I had best confess as simply as possible that
for a long time I was alienated from Mr. Frost's great canon of
work by what I saw in it, that either itself seemed to denigrate the
work of the critical intellect or that gave to its admirers the ground
for making the denigration. It was but recently that my resistance,
at the behest of better understanding, yielded to admiration-it is
