WRITERS AND POLITICS
377
manipulated by the creative will of the Marxist, is rich in this kind of
raw material poetic thinking.
The temptation for the poet is to take over the rhetoric of political
will and action and translate it into the rhetoric of poetry without
confronting the public rhetoric of politics with the private values of
poetry.
If
there is a sin common to poetry such as Auden's
SPain,
the
anti-Semitic passages in Eliot's Sweeney poems, the political passages
in P.ound's cantos, Wyndham Lewis' adulation of what he calls "the
party of genius" (meaning Michelangelo and Wyndham Lewis),
Lawrence's worship of the dynamic will of nature's aristocrats (in
The Plumed Serpent),
certain of my own lines, it is that the poet has–
if only for a few moments-allowed his scrupulous poet's rhetoric of the
study of "minute particulars" to be overwhelmed by his secret yearning
for a heroic public rhetoric. Sensibility has surrendered to will, the
Keatsian concept of poetic personality to the dominating mode of char–
acter.
In a period when poets seemed imprisoned in their private worlds,
their occasional acts of surrender to the excitement of a public world
of action in the service of what they could pretend to themselves was
a civilizing cause is understandable. But the reactionariness of the
"reactionaries" is the weakness, not the strength, of their work. Wil–
liam Empson writes in his curious, sympathetic preface to Mr. Harri–
son's book that he doubts whether the political issues of "their weak–
ness for Fascism" was "the central one." He adds:
Now that everything is so dismal we should look back with
reverence on the great age of poets and fundamental thinkers,
who were so ready to consider heroic remedies. Perhaps
their gloomy prophecies have simply come true.
We (and here by "we" I mean the thirties' writers) not only look
back on them with reverence, but we also revered them at the time.
It
is important to understand that we thought of them as a greater
generation of more devoted artists. That we did so made us reflect
that we were a generation less single-minded in our art, but which had
perhaps found a new subject- the social situation. We did not
think
this
could lead to better work than theirs, but On the other hand we saw
that young poets could not go on writing esoteric poetry about the end
of civilization. Yet their endgames were our beginnings. Our genera–
tion reacted against the same conventions of Georgian poetry and the
novel as did the generation of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H.
Lawrence and E. M. Forster. They were indeed our heroes.
