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STEPHEN SPENDER
were continuous within the present - palpable as nature, architecture,
and manners - had died.
It
continued only in literature and as sub–
jects of academic study in universities. America now became the cen–
ter of the civilization whose main characteristic was the continuous
transformation of all lived experience into arts whose values were en–
tirely contemporary. Knowledge of the past could be absorbed into this
contemporary creative consciousness, but only as contemporary knowl–
edge, not as providing standpoints of outsideness from which the con–
temporary world could be viewed. Many American poets (Wallace
Stevens, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Robert Lowell) were con–
siderably learned, but they assimilated and absorbed the material of
their knowledge in work expressive of their contemporary situation
to which the past offered no alternative:
The earth for us is flat and bar.e.
There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.
Wallace Stevens evokes the past only to reject it as an alternative
to that reality of the present situation which he makes the meeting
point of his imagination with the reality that goes into his poetry.
*
*
*
Above, I quoted Donald Davie as wntIng of the situation of
England as a completely industrialized and suburbanized country and
anticipating a situation which will undoubtedly arise with other coun–
tries. With the abolition of the past and the ruination of the coun–
tryside, poetry has to draw on the reality of the contemporary situa–
tion and the relationship of the individual writer to this. The civiliza–
tion has to continually transform immediate situations into language,
forms, and art which express them.
Today the difference between the English and American civiliza–
tion is no longer the qualitative one between the country that has a
past tradition and the one that lacks it. The difference
is
now quan–
titative: that between the country which is the center of power and
wealth in the area of the common language and the one which has
