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RICHARD POIRIER
foldings struggle up in torment in
him,
as buds struggle forth from
the midst of a plant. Any man of real individuality tries to know
and to understand what is happening, even in himself, as he goes
along. This struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out
in art. It is a very great part of life. It is not superimposition of a
theory. It is the passionate struggle into conscious being.
We are now in a period of crisis. Every man who is acutely
alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul. The people that can
bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this people will endure.
Those others, that fix themselves in the old idea, will perish with
the new life strangled unborn within them. Men must speak out to
one another.
In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly
modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the
author; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or
understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which
works up to culmination.
The notion that to bring forth a new passion or a new idea
involves verbal struggle against established forms is given a some–
what ironic confirmation by the fact that the notion is itself one of
the most persistent conventions of literature. Stylistic revolution is
not the exclusive product of any particular historical situation, or the
exclusive property of any national literature.
If it
seems to belong to
American writing at the time of Cooper and Emerson, it also belongs
to the America of Hamlin Garland and later of Hemingway.
If
it
belonged to English and American poetry when Pound wrote
Make
It New,
to English poetry when Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote the
Preface to the second edition of the
Lyrical Ballads,
it also belonged
to Samuel Daniel, some two hundred years earlier, when he announced
the fitness of English for rhymed verse. When Gertrude Stein laid
down the law that "A rose is a rose is a rose" she was being repetitious
with an intention already described. She probably did not intend also
to be almost directly repetitious of Emerson in
Self Reliance:
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not
say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed
before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my
