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PARTISAN REVIEW
times it is a challenge, at times a fortress or a monument, but it always
represents the will to endure. Time concentrated and transmuted. It sets
in opposition to real time not fixed structure but living architecture.
Sonnet or ballad, Italian hendecasyllable or Japanese tanka, free verse or
poem in prose - all forms and all meters are arks for crossing the sea of
years and centuries. The memory of mankind. Art is a will to form be–
cause it is a will to endure. When a form becomes outworn or turns
into a mere formula, the poet must invent another. Or find an old one
and remake it: reinvent it. The invention of a form is often a new thing
that is two or three hundred years old. There is nothing newer than the
Chinese poems that Pound re-created, the songs in which Apollinaire
brought medieval meters back to life, or the hesitant music, evasive yet
evocative, that Dario learned from Verlaine, and Verlaine from Villon.
But the publishing industry prefers digestible novelties, formulas to forms.
The first half of this century was a period of invention and creation
in all the arts. Thus it was also a time when new art was unpopular, as
had been the case with Symbolism. Fortunately, poets and artists enjoyed
the support of a number of patrons, publishers, art galleries, and collec–
tors. The modern art that today hundreds of thousands admire in muse–
ums, and the books that everybody talks about and buys, were the art
and literature of a small minority little more than fifty years ago. Since
the Second World War, artistic activities have multiplied: museums,
gal–
leries, biennials, international auctions, rivers of gold, oceans of publicity.
The same thing has occurred, though on a far lesser scale, in the world
of publishing. Still, stereotypes predominate in both the visual arts and
literature. The "in" word
postmodernism
designates an eclecticism. Re–
hashing abounds in painting and the other arts. It will be said that I ex–
aggerate. Although the causes of this situation are many and complex, I
firmly believe that the principal cause is the transformation of what was
once the literary and artistic trade into a modern financial market.
An
economic change that coincides with another, a moral-political change,
in the democracies of the West: the turning of citizens into consumers.
