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PARTISAN REVIEW
This wntmg still bears a recognizable resemblance to the simple
propositions of the geography textbook. There is no sentence which
does not possess a similar clarity and unchallengeability . Yet since
these concluding lines are poetry, not geography, they have a dream
truth as well as a daylight truth about them; they are as hal–
lucinatory as they are accurate. They also possess that
sine qua non
of
all lyric utterance , a completely persuasive inner cadence which is
deeply intimate with the laden water of full tide. The lines are in–
habited by certain profoundly true tones , which as Robert Frost put
it, "were before words were, living in the cave of the mouth," and
they do what poetry most essentially does : they fortify our inclina–
tion to credit promptings of our intuitive beings. They help us to say
in the first recesses of ourselves, in the shyest, presocial part of our
nature, "Yes, I know something like that too. Yes, that's right: thank
you for putting words on it and making it more or less official ." And
thus the government of the tongue gains our votes, and Anna Swir's
proclamation (which at first may have sounded a bit overstated)
comes true in the sensation of reading even a poet as shy of bardic
presumption as Elizabeth Bishop:
A poet becomes then an antenna capturing
the voices of the world , a medium expressing
his own subconscious and the collective
subconscious.
In conclusion, I offer two further "texts" for meditation. The first is
from T . S. Eliot. Forty-four years ago, in October 1942, in wartime
London, when T. S. Eliot was at work on "Little Gidding," he wrote
in a letter to E. Martin Browne:
In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard , when you sit
down at a desk , to feel confident that morning after morning
spent fiddling with words and rhythms is justified ac–
tivity-especially as there is never any certainty that the whole
thing won't have to be scrapped . And on the other hand, external
or public activity is more of a drug than in this solitary toil which
often seems so pointless .
Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in
general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are
