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STEPHEN SPENDER
to the extremist end - their violent deaths - the drama in which the
modem world - America - stands for the destruction of values
which the poet affirms in
his
imagination and his flesh.
It
would be oversimplifying to divide American poets into
"r0-
mantics" and "confessionalists," like Byron or Shelley, who made the
mistake of living out their poetic feelings, and paid for the error
with their lives, and those like Eliot who adopted a classical stance
and made a cult of impersonality. For Eliot, despite his famous theory
about the necessity of using poetry as a means of escaping from the
poet's personality, had attitudes to poetry which, at any rate when
he was young, he lived out. These merged with
his
critical polemics
and his views .about religion and culture. Pound shared Eliot's ideas
that poems should
be
objective, hard, detached; yet the mistaken
political views, for which he paid so cruelly, were an extension of
his
life-commitment to poetry and criticism.
There is a continuous line of American artists whose commitment
to their art and to attitudes of life inseparable from it is both per–
sonal and public. This explains, I think, the position of poets -
as
apart from their poetry - in American life. But of course they would
not have this real, though limited position, but for the fact that it
corresponds to the feelings of people whose aspirations they express.
Unlike so many other American attitudes this is not explicable
by mechanical analysis, nor is it rationalization. There is something
dense, rich and impenetrable about it, some fundamental quality of
American life which is the prime mover and cause of other, often
mistaken activities, but is not subject to the criticism with which they
can
be
met. It is American but has as little to do with Americaniza–
tion as Jesus Christ has to with
Jesus Christ Superstar.
This deepest thing in American life is the consciousness of the
need for redemption. That it exists explains, I think, many other
things, for instance, the willingness of Americans to listen to criticism
which undermines their unwillingness to listen to it. A historic example
is James's tour of American women's campuses in 1904 in which he
told
his
audiences that they had no manners and less language. In
his
writings describing this tour he commented on the incom–
prehension of the young ladies he addressed, finding illustration of
their rudeness in their surly blankness. What he did not remark on
was the politeness underlying the rudeness: the politeness of audiences
