PARTISAN REVIEW
341
Romantic poets, a major gesture of their new emotional freedom
was to abandon the straitjacket of the classical rhymed couplet.
Similarly, the first modernists jettisoned traditional rhymes and meters
in favor of a free verse which would allow them to follow precisely
and without deflection the movement of their sensibilities. Technical
exploration, in short, implies a degree of psychic exploration; the
more radical the experiments, the deeper the responses tapped. That,
presumably, is why the urge to experiment faded in the nineteen–
thirties when it seemed that left-wing politics should provide all the
answers, and again in England in the nineteen-fifties when the Move–
ment poets were busy immortalizing the securities and complacencies
of the commuter suburbs. Not that an experimental, avant-garde
appearance guarantees anything; it can be as easily assumed as any
other fancy dress and, more easily than most, becomes an embarrass–
ment to the timid and conventional, since its see-through design ef–
fortlessly reveals the user's lack of originality: witness the drab fol–
lowers of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, on both sides
of the Atlantic.
But for the more serious artists experiment has not been a matter
of merely tinkering with the machinery. Instead, it has provided a
context in which he explores the perennial question, "What am
I?"
without benefit of moral, cultural or even technical securities. Since
part of
his
gift is also a weird knack of sensing and expressing the
strains of his time in advance of other people, the movement of the
modem arts has been, with continual minor diversions, toward a
progressively more inward response to a progressively more intolerable
sense of disaster.
It
is as though, by taking to its limits Conrad's
dictum "In the destructive element immerse," his whole role in
s0-
ciety had changed; instead of being a Romantic hero and liberator,
he has become a victim, a scapegoat.
One of the most beautiful, and certainly the saddest statement
of this new fate is by Wilfred Owen, who was dead before the great
Modernist change had properly begun. On New Year's Eve, 1917/18,
he wrote to his mother:
I am not dissatisfied with my years. Everything has been done in
bouts:
Bouts of awful labour at Shrewsbury and Bordeaux; bouts of
amazing pleasure in the Pyrenees, and play at Craiglockhart; bouts
