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PARTISAN REVIEW
stood before the gate of the prison with a package to deliver to him. Her
poem is about all the mothers standing before the gates of the prisons.
Brodsky says that Akhmatova had enormous difficulty and pain writing
that poem, because her feeling was real and authentic, but when putting
it into form, she felt that she betrayed the authenticity of her feeling, be–
cause form imposed its own exigencies. This is precisely the conflict
between form and content and human experience.
It
is, in my opinion,
extremely important and it explains why so little of the experience of our
century has been fixed, retained in our language.
As I said, we have lived through the secular translation of the order of
redemption and now are living in a century of social utopias and search
for solutions, for social and secular redemption. Sometime ago I visited
the Vatican Museum of Modern Art. There are very few paintings there
that have overtly religious subjects, but their effect proves a very deep
link between art and religion. They can speak in a roundabout way in ap–
proaching religious subjects. I consider that true Christian books in this
century were written by writers who do not in their novels confess their
Christianity directly. The books of ToIkein and
C.
S. Lewis, for instance,
are concerned with good and evil but not in any confessional sense.
So in response to Denis Donoghue's excellent observations, I want to
draw attention to that very profound conflict for the artist between his
own realm and the social-ethical realm.
Elizabeth Spires:
Denis Donoghue has spoken of literature turning aside
from the world rather than annotating it. I would tend to agree, although
I might include the idea of literature penetrating and illuminating life
from within. I don't see literature as being able to change or improve the
social order. As Auden said once, poetry makes nothing happen. And yet,
playing against this is an intangible effect that it has on us which is very
hard to describe. I would like to read a very short passage from Yeats to
illustrate this:
I was writing once a very symbolical and abstract poem, when my pen fell to the
ground; and as I stooped to pick it up, I remembered some fantastic adventure
that yet did not seem fantastic, and then another like adventure, and when I
asked myself when these things had happened, I found that I was remembering
my dreams for many nights. I tried to remember what I had done the day before,
and then what I had done that morning; but all my waking life had perished from
me, and it was only after a struggle that I came to remember it again, and as I did
so, that more powerful and startling life perished in its turn. Had my pen not
fallen on the ground and so made me tum from the images I was weaving into
verse, I would never have known that meditation had become trance, for I
