the younger poets addressed itself to the common man; influenced by the musichall, the movies, and the radio, it attempted to be persuasive and "popular." The tone was easy-going, pseudo-jocular, masking grimness in a false gaiety. An excellent example is Harry Brown's "The Ambulant Blues," which begins: Went into a skyscraper, asked for love,

They said I'd better try the floor up above,
Thanked them politely and climbed the stair,
But I didn't find anything but thin, thin air.
Turned me around and went away,

And heard them whispering, "He didn't stay."
But there was no use in standing around

To wait for a wound.

On the other hand, many of the youngest writers assumed a solemnly detached air and addressed themselves not to the common man but to the exceptional man, the scholar, the wit. It was no accident that the original Nashville "Fugitives" (see page 25) were teachers, and their descendants, the scattered "Neo-Fugitives" (Randall Jarrell, W. R. Moses, George Marion O'Donnell) were pupils who became professors. Their work-especially Jarrell's-was deceptive, adroitly elaborate and yet remote; sometimes it was so clever that it outwitted its subject. More often than not it was vague in its references, allusive in a pedantic way, as in W. R. Moses' "Old Triton's Wreathed Horn," which concludes:

One x may represent commodities

Largely diverse, so one thing be the same;
Restraint, imposed by hunger or by will,

Ones waves of thoughts and starlings. What's a piece,
By part of it we represent: the tame

Thoughts I may drop, be pennoned by the game

Of black, bird-waves in grey, mid-winter seas.

At one extreme the writing of the thirties tended to grow polemical and flatly "proletarian." At the other extreme it became hypersensitive, obscure, and abstractly "patrician."

SYSTEMATIC CONFUSION: SURREALISM

The advance-guard experimenters of the late thirties, unlike their immediate predecessors, were uninterested in political issues, indifferent to a world of revolutionary change. They were not ignorant of war and revolution, but they were determined to evade and, if possible, to avoid the issues. Concerned almost wholly with the "need of self-expression," they became defenders of a repudiated position. Theirs was a retreat to the crumbling ivory tower, a championship of the almost forgotten "Art for Art's sake," an elaborate if topsy-turvy estheticism.

The inevitable result of the evasion of ordinary experience was a plunge into fantasy; the fear of reality was answered by surrealism. Surrealism was the "justification" of failure to deal with the actual and difficult world; it was the

ultimate escape, the denial of logic, the triumph of unmeaning. In surrealism irresponsibility was glorified; cause and effect were casually reversed; the image, liberated from all restraint, flew off into orgies of free association. In 1940 such magazines as Diogenes and Experimental Review and collections like New Directions devoted much of their space to examples and examinations of non-logical writing, purposeful incongruity, and "uncensored dictations from the unconscious."

Although surrealism made a point of ridiculing all formulas, it did not disdain a program of its own. The pronouncements were not troubled by consistency. A leading protagonist of surrealism, Nicolas Calas, wrote, "To responsibility the surrealists oppose revelation." And Salvador Dali, painter and theorist, asked: "May not one succeed in systematizing confusion, and so assist the total discrediting of the world of reality?"

Such attempts to "discredit the world of reality" by "systematizing confusion" had already begun in Europe early in the twentieth century. But the effort "to reduce and finally dispose of the contradictions between dream and waking, between the 'real' and the 'unreal'" had its American protagonists. One of them, Charles Henri Ford, began a poem lightly entitled "He Cut His Finger on Eternity" with these lines:

What grouchy war-tanks intend to shred

or crouch the road's middle to stop my copy?
I'll ride roughshod as an anniversary

down the great coiled gap of your ear.

Oscar Williams, a poet of energetic if wanton metaphors, opened his poem "Mister I" with this kaleidoscopic verse:

He climbed up the walls of the well into the forbidden nest
And caught the ambushed bird by the scruff of its great voice:
Meadows full of insects trundled off under a bushel of abstraction;
Ingots of rodent drummed at his conscience armored in action.

Richard Eberhart, who never subscribed to the surrealist doctrine, surpassed many of the official adherents in triumphs of discontinuity. When he was most persuasive Eberhart was most obscure. For example:

In prisons of established craze

Hear the sane tread without noise
Whose songs no iron walls will raze
Though hearts are as of girls and boys.

By the waters burning clear
Where sheds of men are only seen,
Accept eloquent time, and revere
The silence of the great machine.

In spite of providing a few entertaining adventures in verbal anarchy, the surrealist movement remained a cult for the eccentric and an exhibit of the curious. Only the extremists welcomed the dissolution of form, the desirability of automatic responses, and the "law of incongruity." The rest refused to be

lieve in a poetry which "has nothing to do with day or reason," a poetry which was chiefly an expression of unrelated and disorganized dreams.

THE CULTURAL CRUCIBLE

It became evident that the creative artist was living in another difficult period of transition. He was continually torn between a nostalgia for the enshrined culture of the past, and a hope-half faith, half fear-for a new order which he could not define and which had not yet defined itself. The contemporary American poets, in common with their colleagues in prose, strove to answer all the demands put upon them by a rapidly changing civilization. They reflected the paradoxical energy of the age and its sterility, its contradictory appetite for realism and fantasy, its open skepticism and not quite buried optimism. They sounded a range hitherto barely suggested in America; they created a poetry panoramic instead of parochial. They differed from most of their English fellow-craftsmen in that they were less hampered by the burdens of tradition or the necessity of casting them off. The temper of the times was for variety of thought and gesture. Both in the conventional and in the experimental modes, American literature became a seething crucible.

THE POET AND THE PUBLIC

Surrounded by complexity, most of the twentieth-century poets struggled for clarity. With few exceptions they tried equally to express themselves and the world they lived in; to them poetry was not merely a craft but a medium of concentrated comprehension. Poetry represented an effort to reach the soul of man. It was the power of one spirit to speak to another and share experience and intuition, the small and immense wonders of the universe: a communication which is also a communion.

A world in flux challenges the poet, but it does not defeat him. Changes in systems are traced through the clash of social and economic adjustments; literature itself is an outcome of social and economic tensions, and the poet is its prime recorder. "The poet," wrote Archibald MacLeish, "with the adjustment of a phrase, with the contrast of an image, with the rhythm of a line, has fixed a focus which all the talk and all the staring of the world has been unable to fix before him. His is a labor which is at all times necessary, for without it that sense of reality which is the poet's greatest accomplishment is lost."

The contemporary period is one of extraordinary, almost chaotic, fluctuations; a contradiction of unhappy analysis and desperate faith, of reckless disillusion and determined affirmation. This volume presumes to show the swing of the pendulum, the pull of tradition and experiment, the constant play between convention and revolt. It is not claimed that every poem in this collection is a great poem. It is maintained, however, that each group of poems has its own individuality and that, in its own way, it combines the force of the imagination with the feel of truth, achieving the union of the known and the unknown, of the familiar and the surprising, which is the essence and power of poetry.

L. U.

WALT

Walt Whitman

ALT (ORIGINALLY WALTER) WHITMAN was born at West Hills, near Huntington, Long Island, May 31, 1819. His mother's people were hard-working Dutch Quakers, his maternal grandfather having been a Long Island horse-breeder. On his father's side he was descended from English Puritans who had farmed American soil for a century and a half.

Whitman's father was a less successful agrarian than his ancestors and, since he was a better carpenter than farmer, the elder Whitman moved his family to the then provincial suburb of Brooklyn. Here the country child grew into the town boy, was lifted up for a moment by Lafayette when the hero revisited America, was equally fascinated by his father's wood-smelling shop and the city streets, received his first sight of “fish-shaped Paumanok” which was to become his beloved Mannahatta, learned at least the rudiments of the three R's, and left school before his teens. At eleven he was already at work as an errand-boy. At twelve he became a "printer's devil.” By the time he was fourteen he had learned the various fonts and began to set type in the composing-room of The Long Island Star. At seventeen, taking up residence in the more profitable metropolis, he was well on the road to being an itinerant printer-journalist. But New York was no Golconda for an uneducated, self-conscious youth and, after a few months, Whitman went back to Long Island.

There he remained until his twenty-second year, living with his numerous relations, intermittently teaching school, delivering papers, contributing "pieces" to The Long Island Democrat. In 1841 Whitman returned to Brooklyn and New York, writing sentimental fillers, novelettes, rhetorical and flabby verses, hack-work editorials for journals now forgotten. In 1842 he wrote a temperance tract, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate, a mixture of campaign material and fourth-rate Dickens, a volume which Whitman later claimed was written for cash in three days. Blossoming out in frock coat and high hat, debonair, his beard smartly trimmed, Whitman at twenty-three was editor of The Daily Aurora. In the capacity of reporter-about-town, he promenaded lower Broadway, spent much time in the theaters, cultivated the opera, flirted impartially with street-corner politics and the haut monde. He was still Walter Whitman when, at the age of twenty-seven, he joined the Brooklyn Eagle.

Various biographers-Emory Holloway, in particular-have ferreted out Whitman's sketches and editorials of this period and, while there are occasional suggestions of the poet to come, most of them betray him as a fluent, even a prolific, journalist and nothing more. The style is alternately chatty and highfalutin; the ideas are undistinguished. At the end of two years, either because of his politics or his unsatisfactory articles, Whitman suddenly lost his editorial position and, with equal abruptness, received an offer from a stranger who was about to start an inde

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