400
PARTISAN REVIEW
and had been: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr, St. Luke 's
Place, Brooklyn-but whence came her intellect and tempera–
ment, fantasy and genius? Who could have foreseen her?
And note that with her chief contemporaries and fellow ge–
niuses all those years she was singularly good-natured-no prob–
lem, no struggle-but she didn't react to them very warmly. She
remained detached, full of her own devices. Furthermore, both in
life and career, she never seemed to march directly at us, from
background to foreground, out of tradition into modernity, as
ambitious happy-natured men and women in the arts are inclined
to do. Like the girl in Rembrandt's picture, her movement was
crossways, from left to right, breasting the mode (mode after
mode), traversing the parade, a law unto herself, more exalted
and more focused than the generality of literary mortals.
Now let me attempt some description of her work: the prose
and the poetry relate closely, almost intermingle. Every single
poem is somewhat prosaic,
as a whole;
but when she writes prose,
she makes it obvious in every sentence that it is a poet writing.
The difference is in detail, and is a matter of degree rather than
of kind; they are more fastidiously selected and extremely com–
pressed in verse, perhaps too extremely, with wildly leaping
transitions and a sort of bejewelled mysteriousness. She shapes
her strange forms , as you might say, fanatically, counting sylla–
bles, balancing the vowels and the consonants, but often this is
less apparent to the ear than to the eye. She is hard to recite, even
to read aloud to oneself.
Sincerity surely is one of her key characteristics. Sometimes
it is indistinguishable from spontaneity. Sometimes spontaneity
takes the lead, and brings about inner circumstances, feelings
and convictions, in which to be sincere is the only honorable,
also the only reasonable, attitude for the mind to take. Spontaneity
di ves; sincerity then has to swim. Statements about this occur
often in her critical and explanatory prose. She speaks of " the
helpless sincerity that precipitates a poem." She says that "orig–
inality is a by-product" of it and that "any writer overwhelmingly
honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others."
All these sayings I found in one of her lectures, having to do
with her " three main aids to persuasion: humility, concentration
and gusto." She concludes with a strong small aphorism: "The
thing is to care and to admit that you do care;
to see the vision
