182
PARTISAN REVIEW
should add that by reflecting on pessimism we have no guarantee of
a positive result, for we may come to recognize it as, partly at least,
justified.
We may advance the hypothesis that the gloom in the poetry of
our century has been gradually increasing and that when looking for
its causes we must go back to the poetry of our predecessors . Today a
poet is aware that modern poetry has its own history, its ancestors,
heroes, and martyrs. It was no coincidence that Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, and Mallarme were Frenchmen, for the birth of their
poetry came at a time when French was still the language of
European culture. The new poetry was born out of a deep schism
within that culture, out of a clash between diametrically opposed
philosophies and ways of life. With the year 1848 the Age of
Raptures came to its close and the Age of Progress began . That was
the season of the victorious scientific
J#Jltanschauung,
positivism, new
inventions joyously accepted , the triumphant march of technology.
But the underground already existed, and the underground knew
that a worm was hidden in the beautiful apple. The voice of the
underground is heard in Dostoevsky and in Nietzsche, who
predicted the ascent of what he called European nihilism. In poetry,
bohemia proclaimed its disagreement, trying to oppose average
mortals, the bourgeoisie, with its own different scale of values, even
different dress, and dividing people into the elect, worthy of
receiving the sacrament of art, on the one hand , and ordinary bread
eaters on the other. What is essential here is the conviction, lucidly
formulated by the French symbolists, that the scale of values still
professed by "right-thinking" citizens was already dead, that its
foundation, religion, had been hollowed out from inside, and that
art was going to take over its function and become the only dwelling
place of the sacred. The symbolists discovered the idea of a poem as
an autonomous, self-sufficient unit, no longer describing the world
but existing instead
of
the world .
The poetry of the twentieth century inherited the basic quarrel
between bohemian and philistine, something we should not forget .
It was not the best preparation for the encounter with a reality that
grew more gigantic and more ominous with every decade,
increasingly eluding the grasp of the mind. The heritage of bohemia
provides an explanation of at least some features of modern and
postmodern poetry that make it very different from the poetry
written in the name of hope .
