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PARTISAN REVIEW
from atrophy of the heart and liver. Such poetry depends on noting
down intellectual impressions visual ones above all; intellect fulfills the
role of an engineer of impressions so that the object of its interests is
more the poetic work itself than the wide world. The godparents of this
method are the theoreticians of pure poetry who, like Edgar Allan Poe,
argued that poetry should not venture into the realm of passion or the
field of virtue. Perhaps in a stormier era such poetry has a better chance
of surviving, since a certain degree of insensitivity helps one keep one's
calm and balance. It is free to legitimize itself against its attackers by cit–
ing the positive pedagogical influence it exerts in shaping the sense of
rational construction. However, the aggrieved heart and liver, along
with the aggrieved mind, which reluctantly agrees to perform only
mathematical functions, demand their rights, and that safe "alcove for
rent" becomes cramped.
When, after many years of disrupted contact with French poetry, the
first books (by Eluard and Aragon) fell into my hands, I felt both satis–
faction and embarrassment. I was satisfied because they fulfilled my pre–
diction about the expanding range of topics. My embarrassment was the
embarrassment of a Pole: Damn it, we could have written just like that
during the war. But it never entered our mind. We were ashamed: they
were throwing themselves into patriotic themes with a degree of enthu–
siasm that we could not match. In situations like these we quote our
great poets: Mickiewicz, Siowacki, Krasiriski, Norwid. We have a tradi–
tion of suffering. But they are not terrified by the shade of Victor Hugo,
and like neophytes, they are rapacious.
I think that Aragon's poetry is overrated in Poland. The thrashings he
receives in France, precisely for what makes us uncomfortable, are often
well deserved. Despite this, his experiments with applying the ballad
style to France's struggles and hopes is as interesting
(toute proportion
gardee)
as Picasso's furious drive to depict the world as monstrous or
the transformations of Eluard, whom one would hardly have predicted
would become a poet of underground France.
The process is taking a different turn in the Anglo-Saxon countries.
But if we consider just the works of
T.
S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, we will
find in their poems microdramas, satires, philosophical treatises, and
comedies in the style of Aristophanes. Right now, a book by the fine
young American poet Karl Shapiro, his
Essay on Rime,
is lying before
me.
It
is a treatise on poetry in verse. I don 't want to underestimate this
drilling of new tunnels by poetry, its turning back to before the nine–
teenth century in search of forms of expression which are by now so
