The bedlam of persuasions, personal creeds,
Opposing forms, methods of dialectics,
And their subjoined esthetics might be classed
Together under the heading Criticism.
By criticism I do not mean the art
Of judging art, but the complex of mind
Which has beset the modern writer, that
Which is expressed through self-dependent pride
In thought, act and invention. Commonly
We call this Objectivity, though Locke
In a less positive age referred to it
As Prudence. Love of evidence and fact
Has narrowed vision and imagination
In poetry to the vanishing point. Our moral
Self-reliance in art disclaims the worth
And even the use of art. The frenzied poet
Exhausted in the half-lit cage of science,
Pretending faith and weak identity
With his subjective soul is not the Faust
Who stormed the door of Hell and roused the Devil.
Alas for us, the structural universe
Has neither good nor evil but only true
And false; we have the legend in reverse:
Satan calls us to save him from ennui
And to display our knowledge of the earth.
The triumph of criticism is seen at last
In our alchemic search for what we call
The criterion and the value. Man as a spirit
Having been laid to rest by Sociology,
Psychoanalysis and Economics seeks
That to which substance can hold fast and yet
Be free as substance. In our neutrality
Of spirit we cannot countenance the soul
Or treat with it except as ectoplasm,
That is with humor and sophistication.
Yet curiously we note a chronic spasm
Of guilt in rime suggesting that morality
As the conflict of inborn good and evil
In human nature is still a force. We play
Semantically upon these attributes
Which once were the omnipotent and perfect
Prongs of the magnet of all life and death,
And holding to this neutral course we claim
The discovery of a science in behavior,
Our talk of which dilates on right and wrong
Values in point-of-view, criteria
In taste, and criticism in everything.
One need but ask Where is the literature
Of nature, where the love poem and the plain
Statement of feeling? How and when and why
Did we conceive our horror for emotion
Our fear of beauty? Whence the isolation
And proud withdrawal of the intellectual
Into the cool control-room of the brain?
At what point in the history of art
Has such a cleavage between audience
And poet existed? When before has rime
Relied so heavily on the interpreter,
The analyst and the critic? Finally how
Has poetry as the vision of the soul
Descended to the poetry of sensation,
And that translated to the perceptive kind,
Evolved into the poetry of ideas?
Perhaps it is that Poe was the last poet
In the classic signification of the word;
Europe was quick to claim the furniture
Of his rich vision (and the sticks and props
With which he stuffed his mansion) but the bird,
The princess, Helen herself, were dead.
Recumbent Poe before the deep backdrops
Became the Lenin of the Symbolists;
The yeast of criticism worked, and rime
Declined to verbiage, decomposed to forms.
The greatest of the logical suicides
During that century of fermenting art
Witnessed the great confusion and vowed silence;
This was Rimbaud, in whom the broken cry
To purify the word echoes the prayer
Of Baudelaire to purify the heart.
Nor is it any accident that Emerson
Anointed Whitman and not Poe. The nation
A hundred years ago was real estate
For the synthetic myth and poetry
On the grand national-international scale.
I do not think that I exaggerate
In saying that our period has produced
More poems conceived as epics, large and small,
Than has the entire history of rime!
The bulk of these fall from the sanguine pens
Of Emersonian and Whitmanian bards;
These in their works, as if to justify
And prove our transcendental unity,
Recite the whole geography and construct
A gigantic stage perennially set
For some Siegfried who never comes. How odd
That Sandburg turning from the likely god
Of this mythology deserts his rime
And turns to monumental scholarship
For his interpretation. The poet himself
Observes the overall imperative
Of criticism; poetry must wait on fact.
And we have seen that when the hero lifts
The vizor of his helmet to the gaze
Of the ecstatic myth-mad populace
That it is nothing but a shell, a voice
Without a face, a brash and neutral horn
That amplifies our disappointed hopes
And sends them crashing broadcast in the city
With deafening demolition; air-raid, panic
And fall, on these discords this music ends.
Thus our instinct for heroism gropes
Like a blinded Samson in captivity
Only to pull the roof down on our heads
And by the inherent potency of belief
To wreck the temple, Dagon and ourselves.
Our unifying manic myth persists
To tempt the ambitious nevertheless and pledge
To art the quantum and the formula
Of a world-faith. Rime at the ragged edge
Of civilization weeps among the facts.
The Dead Hand and Exhaustion of Our Rime
With the instinctive vigilance of the great
Explorer, Freud in a final summary
Of psychoanalysis as a key to life
Denies its value as a Weltanschauung.
The founder of depth psychology disavowing
Philosophy and religion as the mummery
Of wishfulness and illusion turns at last
To total science as the remaining basis
For whole belief; nor does he minimize
The force and the persistence of past faiths
And present in the psychic scheme of things.
But of the arts—and here we end our tract
On rimehe briefly says that in the main
They are beneficent and harmless forms.
This is the sane perspective, one that brings
The beloved creative function back to scale.
We cannot end like Dante on the stars
Until we view them with the saintly gaze
Of humble men acknowledging our knowledge
Of nothing. Though we pretend to walk on Mars
With its proposed canals, Platonic cities
And supermen, while in the grip of art
As Weltanschauung, we show that we have failed
To cross the neutral void. Secure on earth,
The rime of pure belief, its spirit spent,
Tired, hysterical, diffuse and vain
Beseeches such as Freud for sympathy
And is rejected. Ultimately, on pain
Of violent separation from the states
Of being, art in its disembodied forms
Wanders through life as through a Mardi Gras
And maunders back upon the stroke of twelve
To black oblivion. Reconstructing night,
The poet with painted and lackluster eye
Stares in the glass at pallid dawn and sees
The image of his sufficiency, a face
Wretched in weakness and a vibrant claw
Trailing a pen. From such ennui the poem
Takes its first line, digresses for a space,
Slips sidewise on a metaphor, proceeds
In doubt of its intention toward a pitch
Of mild mental excitement, strings its beads
Of meaning on the mended thread of rhythm,
Comments its way to a conclusion which
Is nothing but the vestigial proof of nothing;
Or else in senseless violence on itself
Ends in a brawl of vocatives and a roar
Of “ancestral voices prophesying war.”
This is the norm and type of modern rime
In the mid-century of our art; deny
The evidence if you will, but there are tiers
Of volumes marked and catalogued and sealed
At library temperature, and enough to lay
A crowd of us forever in Potter’s Field.
I do not mean to fix an epitaph
To this essay, or end on the dead note
Of disillusion. Lucky for all concerned
No man can kill the destined poem or breathe
A breath into the natural corpse of one.
To feel the stir of life, impounded sun
In rime is finally the pragmatic test,
Nor can we take the measure of the best
Except for our own time. In the long run
The crimes and fallacies of an age of art
Are set beside its high deeds and its truths
In reasonable perspective. Not to stand pat
On this truism, however, or break the back
Of my own cause, I here should underline
The three confusions I have spoken of,
In Prosody, in Language, and in Belief.
That these aspects should terminate in grief
To art is our misfortune. In the above
I have tried to indicate no more than that
The aftermath of poetry should be love.
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