ALFRED KAZIN
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out for Whitman and Frost in the teeth of all the old-new critics who
were ashamed of Whitman's exuberance. Because dogmatists like
Yvor Winters had authoritatively put it down that Frost was a
"hedonist," one had to explain, so patiently, that Frost is in fact one
of our great tragic writers- with examples, many examples, and il–
lustrations from the history of English poetry. And there's the rub,
since just as all it needs to be a television critic these days is an eccen–
tric moustache, so all it needs to make your mark in certain maga–
zines is the ability to recite one's own prejudices with insolence and if
possible a white suit in all seasons.
In truth, there have never been so many intelligent critics
working at the same time, so much opinion informed by the
tradition
ofmodernism
in all its particular emphasis on sophistication and style.
When I think of the crude moralizing and propagandizing of general
reviewing in the thirties, when I began in this trade, and the profes–
sional stuffiness of academic opinion, still resolutely opposed to
everything of the twenties that was already history, I note a distinct
rise in literary intelligence. But modernism has not really existed
since the twenties ; there are only students of modernism, museums
of modernism. The once banned and exiled Joyce, victim of many a
philistine's book fire, is now the academy's favorite pedant. Hem–
ingway, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Cummings, Djuna Barnes have had
no continuation in the century of the common man that began with
the thirties . The liveliest fictionalists of our time and place are not
experimentalists but social novelists of a period when the moral
order is not meaningless, as it was for the twenties, but plainly
disintegrating.
"Can you describe this?" a woman said to the great Russian
lyric poet Akhmatova as the women stood in line before one of Stalin's
prisons in the hope of obtaining some communication with their
menfolk. "Yes!" said Akhmatova, and in
Requiem
she did. But the
freezing terror had taken over, the subject had taken over after so
much talk in the twenties about "the revolution of the word." In our
day
events
dominate. Literature must share "reality" with journalism,
often turns to journalism in order to do justice to such a vast disloca–
tion.
So all this abundant critical intelligence does not have the old
resonance , the influence on the private reader in his solitude. No
one takes criticism so seriously as a critic, but there are fewer and
fewer critics now, much as I may admire the general performance,
who influence my reading and thinking as did Eliot on Pascal, D. H.
