Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
makes me very enthusiastic about Panic. I consider it no slight triumph for a man to take a current issue, surrounded with the most realistic connotations, and treat it in a style neither pompous nor lame. Here again, I think, MacLeish has solved much of his problem by recourse to news. For many of the speeches that would have been least amenable to poetic formalization (such as lists of bank failures) are given the necessary amount of distinction, while still seeming “natural,” by reason of the fact that they are phrased in the tone of headlines or telegrams. When the people from the street are reading from the bulletin, or Immelman is reading from the ticker, the correspondence is of course complete. But again and again we find the plot upheld by information or judgments whose expression gravitates about the conventions of news-writing. For this reason lines can seem “natural” even when beginning bluntly with nouns (the appropriate definite or indefinite article being omitted), and when marked by forms of ellipsis totally alien to conversational syntax (as when a character says: “He helping is hope”).
MacLeish asserts in his introduction: “The classical rhythm equivalent to American speech would be more nearly the trochee or the dactyl than the iamb of blank verse.” But I hold that this remark really applies most aptly to written forms, the headline and telegraphic styles. Indeed, it is where the plot is carried by monologue (as the plot of history is conveyed in the daily press by monologue) that MacLeish’s style truly observes his injunction to “descend from stressed syllables” rather than (as in blank verse) “rise toward stressed syllables.” The further his play departs from recitation and the closer it comes to true dramatic dialogue, the stronger is the tendency of the ear to hear the lines as iambic, regardless of his typographical divisions. But as evidence of how subtly MacLeish elaborates the headline conventions, and as corroboration for my belief that in his reliance upon news (both as the core of his dramatic causation and as the key for his style) he has solved the poet’s problem of acquiring both conventionalization and “naturalness” at once, I might quote this fragment from a speech by The Blind Man:
Knowing
Never for what fault or
Failing of ours is altered the
World’s future suddenly—Spilling of what blood:
Thing done or not done:
Holy duty forgotten—Knowing neither the fault nor the
Finder—nevertheless
We know well His messenger!
Death we have always known!
MacLeish writes that “the rhythms of contemporary American speech . . . are nervous, not muscular; excited, not deliberate; vivid, not proud.” Which may or may not be true—but as I read the above verses, I felt that their peculiar quality of “nervousness,” “excitement,” and “vividness” was not that of speech at all, but the strange mixture of jerkiness and fluency that impresses one when following the galvanic convulsions of a news ticker.
A poet’s symbols probably aim at “condensation” in this way: If he had had a certain attitude towards his parents at one period in his life, and if at other periods he had had an attitude of the same quality towards his companions, his studies, his art, and finally his politics, he might attempt to “integrate” himself by inventing symbolic devices that telescoped all these segments into one. Thus, were we discerning enough, MacLeish’s imaginative identification of himself with the banker who wills to die could probably be traced to the point where his present political emphasis is found to merge with his earlier esthetic one. The symbolism of self-immolation has always been present in his work—and in MacLeish there is a parricidal ingredient. During his days as an esthete, he revealed something of the emotional elements in his ars poetica when he likened a good line of verse to the firm resounding of the ax as it sinks into the tree. We may not be extravagant if we remember, in this connection, that the tree is a “patriarch,” that it stands as the symbol of shelter and authority (oh woodman, spare it)—hence we may suspect what devious condensations are taking place when this poet, on turning from estheticism to politics, pictures a capitalist leader (a “father”?) made ready to die.
The suggestion becomes more plausible when we note, in the young English Communist poets, a clear attempt at the coordinating of their politics with their earlier family relationships. They talk explicitly of their old quarrels with the father (quarrels which, they hint on occasion, even led to sexual gnarling)—and they explicitly merge this old relationship with their new political emphasis by a somewhat magical doctrine of ancestor-worship. In the surprising reversals of this doctrine, a man intellectually reborn can choose his forbears. Thus Stephen Spender, in his recent poem, “Vienna,” concerns himself deeply with such symbolic reorganization. “I think often of a woman,” he says—and ends the stanza of his tribute to her,
It surely was my father
His dry love his dry falling
Through dust and death to stamp my feature
That made me ever fear that fortunate posture.
In the men who died fighting at the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, however, he finds a “father principle” for his new self—and his poem ends
These are
Our ancestors.
The same symbolic pattern lies at the base of C. Day Lewis’s work. His long essay, “A Hope for Poetry,” printed in his volume of Collected Poems, begins with a figure of speech quite relevant to my thesis: “In English poetry there have been several occasions on which the younger son, fretting against parental authority, weary of routine work on the home farm, suspecting too that the soil needs a rest, has packed his bag and set out for a far country.” He proceeds to claim “Hopkins, Owen and Eliot as our immediate ancestors.” He cites Stephen Spender’s poem, “I think continually of those who were truly great,” as indication of what “real ancestors” are. And he quotes from Auden’s The Orators:
It wasn’t till I was sixteen and a half that he (an uncle) invited me to his flat. We had champagne for dinner. When I left I knew who and what he was—my real ancestor.
I most prize in our poets, as distinct from the simple rationalistic pamphleteer, publicist, or economist, the fact that they are alive to the full complexities of human readjustment. Implicit in their work is the knowledge that, with an honest and earnest man, any notable shift of cultural emphasis requires a great deal of “consolidation.” A change in political affiliations, for instance, may not be merely a choice of expedients, as the more superficial pragmatists would suggest; it may involve all sorts of other factors grounded in one’s past. One may not feel that, for him, the particular concern of the three English poets with their “ancestry” is important. The important thing to me is their clear awareness of the fact that a man’s need of “integration” or “fusion” involves factors more complex, and closer to “magic,” than rationalistic oversimplifications of political necessities can reveal.
Lola Ridge is similarly concerned with symbolic mergers in her Dance of Fire, issued in a cover and jacket of deeply glowing bronze that arrestingly announces the tenor of her work. As for “condensation”: in the twenty-eight sonnets of her “Via Ignis” she evolves a kind of dithyrambic metaphysics about the symbol of fire. With Heracleitan thoroughness she finds us “living in a dynasty of fire,” “still in the midst of the fire dance,” for “the flame that breaks down, fuses and forms is still burning nakedly in humanity.” Hence our agitation—to which she holds out the hope that “we may come forth, for a period, into the time of light.” Thus we have a universal burning, existence as trial by fire—and we have a transcendent burning, light. Her sonnets are a highly ritualized statement of her key metaphor. By the unifications of her myth, all that is most significant in experience is drawn together: the “infuriate spark” in us, and in our “blood singing to the ancient horn”; the “tind’rous structure of the heart”; the
lambent menace in the brain,
Too fraught with tensions, which the blood inspires
In radiant passage;
the upheavals of storm, the sea, and nebulae; the “music over