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PARTISAN REVIEW
usually inaccessible to him, and he loses it when that moment is
over.
Poetry's special status among the literary arts derives from the au–
dience's readiness to concede to it a similar efficacy and resource.
The poet is credited with a power to open unexpected and unedited
communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we
inhabit.
The oldest evidence for this attitude appears in the Greek
notion that when a lyric poet gives voice, "it is a god that speaks."
And the attitude persists into the twentieth century: one thinks of
Rilke's restatement of it in his
Sonnets to Orpheus
and, in English, we
may cite the familiar instance of Robert Frost's
~ssay,
"The Figure a
Poem Makes." For Frost, any interference by the knowing intellect
in the purely disinterested cognitions of the form-seeking imagina–
tion constitutes poetic sabotage, an affront to the legislative and ex–
ecutive powers of expression itself. "Read it a hundred times," he
says of the true poem. "It can never lose its sense of a meaning that
once unfolded by surprise as it went."
"It
begins in delight, it inclines
to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it
runs a course of lucky events and ends in a clarification of life - not
necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded
on, but in a momentary stay against confusion."
In this figure of the poem's making, then, we see also a
paradigm of free action issuing in satisfactorily qchieved ends; we
see a path projected to the dimension in which,
Ye~ts
says, "Labour
is blossoming or dancing where
I
The Body is not bruised to pleasure
soul." And just as the poem, in the process of its own genesis, ex–
emplifies a congruence between impulse and right action, so the
poem in its composure and repose gives us a premonition of har–
monies desired and not inexpensively achieved. In this way, the
order of art becomes an achievement intimating a possible order
beyond itself, although its relation to that further order remains
promissory rather than obligatory . Art is not an inferior reflection of
some ordained heavenly system but a rehearsal of it in earthly terms;
art does not trace the given map of a better reality but improvises an
inspired sketch of it.
My favorite instance of this revision of the Platonic schema is
Osip Mandelstam's astonishing fantasia on poetic creation, en–
titled - since Dante was the pretext for the thing- "A Conversation
about Dante." A traditional approach to Dante, naturally enough,
