TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
227
Schwartz, Milosz, Heaney, Zagajewski; the list is too long to recite in
any fullness, but even
to
run our fingers over these few names is to touch
a much longer cord. We might call it a lifeline.
I remember my early conversations with William and Edith, when
they first invited me
to
rustle up poetry for the magazine. William, with
his piercing glance, his hawk-like ferocious energy, was looking for
poetry of large ethical and aesthetic consequence, poetry that took
thinking seriously but that in no way betrayed the sensuous means of its
proper medium. It has been a privilege and an education to hunt for
those poems. And I think I speak for a large kinship system of poets in
thanking
Partisan Review
for the place it has made for our art, a place
where we receive that highest honor, of being read intelligently.
It
is not by accident that I named Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zaga–
jewski.
Partisan
has been influential in the United States, but its influ–
ence has far transcended national boundaries. Especially for writers
behind what we still remember as the Iron Curtain,
Partisan
offered a
rare community in which to express themselves freely and to be read in
the West. As early as
1951,
Partisan Review
was publishing Milosz's
prose, pieces that would become part of
The Captive Mind;
in this way
Partisan
presented, to a somewhat uncomprehending audience here, a
grimly clear analysis of the Marxist dream gone wrong. There are Pol–
ish, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, and Russian poets for whom
Parti–
san
remains a beacon and a home abroad.
When Edith told me about William's last hours, she said two things
in particular that seem to characterize not so much his dying, but his
entire life. "His heart was strong," she said, and, "He died lucid." What
a tribute
to
a life well lived. I would like to say farewell to William by
reading lines from "Epilogue," a poem by Robert Lowell, who cared
deeply for
Partisan Review
and for whom the
Partisan
editors cared:
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
