PARTISAN REVIEW
the Indians made was a dance for their horses,
but serious men made the Gatling gun;
its bullets come true forever-you
go
mad from shooting the gun.
"From east of the mountains, from Daylight Lake,
morning begins," she said,
"and it loves us all; its edge opens the field.
Children, let's sing 'Rescue Me, Day,'
for we are all prisoners here. "
There are widows like that in many schools,
and officers with eyes like badges
that follow a look past the window box,
ready for a dance but mad from the gun,
and stare out over the field .
II
607
In recent years, there has been a casting about for heroes in American life.
Perhaps the anxious confusion of the period has caused among us a particu–
larly great longing to relax into admiration. We want to bask in the stability of
a great talent. We want to experience the steady, warming influence of genius.
Because it is exhausting to have to make up one's mind every day, we are
thankful that certain results endure. Shakespeare and his companions in the
heaven of literature offer us secure ecstasies.
But this is an unstable time in America. Great men are tossed high, and
brought low too quickly. The empyrean of heroes no longer hovers at a lovely
distance. Instead of Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, and Greta Garbo, we have Dus–
tin Hoffman and Jane Fonda, who are good, who are very good, but who are
vulnerable, close enough to our grey level of confusion to cause a hint of envy;
a suspicion that the difference between us and them is not genius, but luck. So
our heroes don't last. Nixon soars to the heighlS and is shot down in months.
Norman Mailer is scarcely anointed, when he skids into ridicule. The heaven
of heroes refuses our burnt offerings.
In this respect the little world of poetry has reflected the larger world.
Almost yearly another banquet is set, another talent is seated at the place
of honor, another offering of praise is elaborately prepared, with overtones of
reverence and grim respect. But there are no sustained hosannas, no beatitude
of settled values. The subtle acids of doubt topple the celebration, and a year or
two later the hero has subsided into the unfinishable labor of becoming a poet
-a labor which he himself has never discontinued. But now we leave him to
it, buying his books perhaps, but exhausted once again by the need to make up
our minds. Alan Dugan, Robert Bly, James Wright, John Ashbery, W. S. Mer–
win, Allen Ginsberg, all have received the pomp of celebration only to be
returned to the world of unfinished men. Robert Lowell lasted longer. The
praise still billows around his knotty countenance, but there is less of it, and,
apparently, less of him. John Berryman had his hour, and a second effort may
