378
STEPHEN SPENDER
Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell were the only reac–
tionaries whose public attitudes we sometimes attacked: with the mental
reservation that we thought them zanies anyway.
As
for Eliot, Yeats
and Lawrence, if one minimized their statements about politics, there
was much in their deepest political insights with which we agreed.
Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
This described our situation. By comparison the fact that Yeats went
out and supported General O'Duffy seemed singularly irrelevant. No
poem could show better than
The Second Coming
how wrong Orwell
was to approach Yeats's poetry as a function of his Fascism. To us, his
Fascism seemed a misconception arising from his deep political (and
here the word seems quite inadequate) insight.
It is a pity that Mr. Harrison, instead of accepting at their face
value labels like "left" and "reactionary," did not compare at a deeper
level
than
that of political parties the social vision of the poets of the
thirties and the older generation. He might have found then that the
two generations often agreed in their diagnoses: they came to opposite
conclusions with regard to remedies. He might also have found that
the younger generation, in coming to their revolutionary conclusions,
owed their view that we were living in a revolutionary situation to the
insights of the reactionaries.
His biographers point out that John Cornford, while he was still
a schoolboy, was led to Communism by reading
The Waste Land.
"He
believed it to be a great poem, read it not as a religious allegory ...
but as an anatomy of capitalist society in decay; it shaped his style,
but more important, it was a preface to his politics."
To the imagination the poetry
does
not preach party matters.
It penetrates into the depths of an external situation and shows what
is strange and terrible. Eliot drew conclusions from his own poetic
insight with his intellect, with which Cornford disagreed when he wrote:
The Waste Land
. . .
is of great importance not for the
pleasure it gives, but for its perfect picture of the disintegra–
tion of a civilisation.... But something more than description,
some analysis of the situation is needed. And it is here that
Eliot breaks down. He refuses to answer the question that he
has so perfectly formulated. He retreats into the familiar
triangle-Classicism, Royalism, Ango-Catholicism. He has not
found an answer to the question of resignation. Rather he hall
resigned himself to finding no answer.
