294
PARTISAN REVIEW
In poetry, what pleases and protects us is decorum. Although we sup–
pose that a great part of poetry's function is, precisely, finding ways to ex–
press the private self, the forbidden, the impolite, it seldom does so. In–
stead, it develops relatively safe adjustments.
It
gives us "personae" and
"the speaker," Yeats's masks, Henry instead ofJohn Berryman. Poets need
"control," just as children do. Poets need distance. Readers need the dis–
tinction between Art and Life. If we doubt the power of the unwritten rules
for literary politeness, we may consider those subcodes of remarkable
persistence, by which poetry touches, yet does not touch, emotions and per–
ceptions that make people uncomfortable in life. To write of love and sex,
for example, we have a pattern set by Petrarch whereby we distinguish be–
tween "high" love and "low" sex, so that a high and serious style cannot be
used for gross sex, and so that the correct stance of the poet-lover is suffer–
ing. Keats violated the code in "The Grecian Urn" - "Most happy love!
Most happy love!" -and critics have been shuddering with embarrass–
ment for him ever since . He spilled the soup.
For anger we have satire. For genuinely subv.ersive ideas of any sort we
have comedy to disarm by laughter and to imply that we do not mean these
ideas literally. For disappointed idealism, which may be the strongest single
"emotion" in twentieth-century poetry, we have the sour grape of irony.
Even so-called "confessional" poets stay well within the bounds of pro–
priety; they cannot offend us by excessive intimacy, for they are alienated
from themselves.
Goodman bawls, boasts, gets excited about Immanuel Kant, exhibits
his penis, and kvetches endlessly. All his ideas are subversive, and he means
everything literally. He has no shame. Depressed, he reminds himself of
when
Goethe burst in tears and Beethoven
leapt from the piano where he was improvising
and shook him and cried out, 'Admit! admit!
admit! admit! admit that it means something! '
Absurdly unpretentious, he mumbles, then shrugs:
What is the Buddha? "Drat!
pass the salt," the sage spat.
I understand . I understand
but I am not enlightened.
Am I enlightened? How would I know?
