PARTISAN REVIEW
369
sense of strain and effort or of the floodgates heing opened and
consciousness overwhelmed in much contemporary American poetry.
For the poet to go to England or Europe now is not to make a jour–
ney into the past civilization, but to go to Flaces where life, although
threatened by the inevitably encroaching situation of total raiding by
all the forces of the contemporaneous technological society, is still
measured on the scale of the individual.
Thus "getting away from this country" for Americans of sensi–
bility is not just escapism.
It
is an attempt to restore the human scale
to their view of events. Of course, by getting away I don't mean,
in all cases, physical journeying. The mind itself can provide its
maps.
For Americans the danger of trying to write out of a realization
of the American scale of the contemporaneous is that it leads to wild
exaggeration of the personal experience of the writer in order to
measure his own life against the forces which have inhuman propor–
tions. The danger for the individual personality is very real and has
led to tragedies of collapse, insanity, and suicide. For the English the
danger is provincialism, that is, of treating the local situation as a
special separate local case, whereas really today it exists within the
wider situation of the whole area of the common language, and, be–
yond that, of the world.
