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PARTISAN REVIEW
form. The great poet, consequently, is also, in his work and because of his
work, the greatest human being, the person most fully human in every
respect. The ability to achieve such stature is naturally rare, and "a gift"–
you can't learn to be a great poet. Since great poems and great poets do
exist, they are our ultimate instances of the nobility and grandness of the
human being.
Before this spectacle the reader's task is appreciation and judgment. In
Winters' judgment, "the two greatest short poems ever written" are both by
Paul Valery. Here is his account of what he considered the best of these two,
Ebauche d'un Serpent,
published in
The Function
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Criticism:
"It is a monologue spoken by the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, and
deals with the Serpent's relationship to God, with the temptation of Eve, and
with the nature of evil. The poem employs the Judeo-Christian myth and
depends upon the Christian concept of evil as privation: but it is neither
Jewish nor Christian in the full development of its thought. The general
theme is approximately this: God, or perfect being, had existed in a state of
immobile perfection; the created universe is a flaw in this perfection-God,
tired of the pure spectacle of himself, destroyed his own perfection, dissi–
pated his principle into consequences, his unity into stars. Heaven is his
error, Time is his ruin, and with them the gaping and animal abyss. The
Serpent was the first and greatest creature, who now illuminates the
diminution of God with all the fires of the Seducer. The Serpent had loved
God to the point of complete loss of self; but he now hates him equally, for
he realizes that by virtue of being a creature he is imperfect, deprived of the
knowledge which as an intellectual creature he infinitely desires, and so
damned. God was aware of his error when he created man, and his breath
upon the clay was a sigh of despair. The Serpent hates men created in the
image of God, just as he hates God, who creates so many imperfect prodi–
gies; the Serpent is the one who modifies and retouches, and who will, in
other words, seduce mankind from its simple and animal felicity to the same
passion for unobtainable knowledge which is the source of his own agony
. . ..Eve is being seduced into a desire for infinite knowledge, but the psy–
chological pattern is that of a sexual seduction; the psychological details,
however, are not merely psychological but are metaphysical as well. Eve
falls, and the Serpent is saddened. The Tree of Knowledge is shaken, and
then the Serpent addresses the Tree in the final stanzas, stanzas in which he
turns away from the somewhat pathetic and trivial sin of seducing Eve to
his original desire for unobtainable knowledge. He is so created that he
desires infinite knowledge, and he is so created that he cannot have it. The
desire is his nature, his greatness, his sin, and his torture, and it is
inescapable. The Tree grows infinitely toward infinity; the Serpent (this old
expert at chess) cradles himself in the branches, so that the fruit trembles
