PARTISAN REVIEW
439
if we at Yale didn't feel personally responsible for the deaths at
Kent State, since we had started all the agitation. When Geoff Davis
answered that the responsibility lay with Nixon and Agnew for their
attempts to polarize the country and dehumanize one part of it as
"bums," we were hissed by a large part of the audience.
They were still living in the night of the cold war, and the
Panthers were simply inconceivable to them.
It
became clear that
our history and theirs were not the same. It wasn't just a question
of age; I was as old as some of them and more than ten years older
than Geoff. It was a question of worlds. I quoted to them the strait–
jacketed priest Jacques Roux's lines near the end of
MaratjSade:
"When will you learn to seej When will you learn to take sides?"
But I knew that if it was easy to take sides when confronted by them,
in larger terms it was profoundly difficult to know what taking sides
meant and how it could be accomplished. What was clear from Yale's
spring was that the connection had been made and that a new and
more difficult level of consciousness had been born in those who had
tried to understand.
New poetry from "one of our best.
If):;
~GI~~
A Sequence of New and Selected Poems
by Philip Booth
The prize-winning poet in a new collection that uses
harbors, coasts, and uplands as both fact and metaphor–
a measure of the hard country where .. most of us live,
each to his own narrow margins of shadow and light.
"RICHARD WILBUR
$5.95
THE VIKING PRESS
