the time of adolescence or the time when we first began to appear in print. Most of us thought when we first appeared in print that all problems were over and we were entirely unaware that on the contrary, all our problems had just begun. But even if we had possessed the knowledge of our elders, we would not have been prepared for the changes which have continually occurred during the past twenty years, changes which make the time of adolescence and of first youth appear to belong to another century and to the experience of some human being other than oneself. The apocalyptic events which have occurred since 1938 throughout the world, and in particular the five years of the second World War, would be sufficient to make the past of twenty years ago seem far more distant from us than twenty years of chronological time. But the changes which have occurred in the state of poetry, changes which could hardly have been anticipated or indeed imagined very often, can best be summarized by citing a series of examples: these examples should indicate, in one or another way, that the changes have sometimes been profound, sometimes superficial, and sometimes misleading, and it is their rapid succession during the past twenty years which make the state of poetry very different and more difficult to define now than in 1938, or indeed at any time, in America, since the Civil War.

My first example, which may be an illustration of the most important change of all, is the visit of T.S.Eliot to America during 1932 and 1933 when, in addition, to teaching and lecturing at various schools, he read his own poetry in public. My own direct experience is limited to a lecture on Milton which Mr. Eliot gave at Columbia and another lecture in New York City in which he quoted verse quite often, but I am sure that I am not mistaken in supposing that Mr. Eliot's public appearances were very different from what occurred

when Dylan Thomas read his poetry in public on his visits to America
between 1949 and 1953. Eliot was already famous then: his authority
as a critic was already that of a literary dictator, and hence his
appearances inspired a sense of awe which went beyond the admiration
one would have felt in the presence of other creative writers of the
same rank, such as Yeats, James Joyce and Thomas Mann. His manner of
lecturing as well as the way in which he read poetry, his own or
another poet's, was extremely impressive. But Eliot's public appearances
only served to confirm what his audience already felt, namely, that he
was a very great poet indeed and the greatest living literary critic.
The experience of attending one of his lectures or readings was like
that of reading his poems or his criticism; it did not create a new
impression of his work. In contrast, this is exactly what Dylan Thomas'
readings in public accomplished when they took place many years after.
Until these readings Thomas was known in America merely as one of
a number of fairly well-known poets. His readings in public made him as
famous, in a short period of time, as T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and William
Butler Yeats had become only after a good many years. And indeed if
not for these readings, it is likely that he would have remained
comparatively unknown to the general public. Many of the people
who were excited, intense admiration by hearing his poems aloud
were people who had found his poetry, when it appeared in print,
opaque, inpenetrable, difficult, obscure, and in a word, unreadable.
Thus what Thomas accomplished by his public readings is meaningful in
ways which extend far beyond the unquestionable importance of his
work. He demonstrated by direct, eloquent and vivid example a truth
about the nature of poetry which no amount of critical elucidation
could have communicated—the truth that the actuality of a poem
is not merely a matter of explicit meanings contained.

5.

5

in each successive line. For many years the majority of readers had been puzzled and irritated by modern poetry's obscurity and difficulty, its esoteric allusions, sudden transitions, or the appearance of a lack of transition, connection and logical order. The irritation of many readers almost always developed into the conviction that the obscurity and difficulty of modern poetry was too great for the uninstructed reader to overcome. Yet when the same readers heard Thomas' poetry aloud, they immediately forgot about their previous impression. Theural experience of a poem, when read as well as Thomas could his own poetry and the poetry of others also, communicated to his listeners an experience of the truth that the total being of a poem is far more than its explicit meanings, and this made the poem very different from what it had seemed to be when it was encountered upon the page and seemed very much like an inferior cross-pword puzzle, an exercise in discovering concealed meanings. The living voice communicated to Thomas' readers the intensely felt attitudes and emotions which were the actual poem in its complete and concrete reality.

There would be a good deal more to say if tonight's subject were restricted to the public's skill or lack of skill in reading poetry as it appears upon the page. Here I must limit my comments to the bearing which Thomas's public readings have had upon the present state of poetry. Thomas' readings initiated what may very well be an immense change in the public's whole conception of the nature of modern poetry.

The enthusiasm he awakened suggests that for the majority of readers a poem as it appears in print has the same relationship to the total reality and being of a poem as a musical score of a symphony has to the orchestral performance of that symphony. I must immediately add that it would be very easy to overestimate--or to underestimate--the advance, and to overlook the very real dangers inherent in the aural experience of poetry. Thus, those who hear a poem aloud do not invariably feel moved to seek out the poem in print. This might very well lead to the neglect of the kind of poetry

in which there is a richness of style and language that requires the eye as well as the ear and tongue. It might encourage the writing of that kind of poetry which lends itself best to being read aloud. It might also encourage one or another kind of histrionic elocutionism and the vulgarity of most forms of oratory and declaration. A great and powerful voice is capable of being extremely hynoptic and deceptive and it can disregard the inferiority of the text; thus Sarah Bernhardt is said to have been able to reduce an audience to tears by reciting the multiplication table.

These and other dangers are all the more difficult to avoid because few poets read poetry aloud very well or indeed with any degree of the eloquence and power which Thomas possessed. The fact that many of the good poets of our time read poetry poorly may be temporary and due to lack of training and experience. But it is also true that few human beings know how to read poetry aloud: few actors possess this skill, however good they may be as actors. This is evident in the way in which Shakespearean blank verse is spoken in most productions of Shakespeare; it is spoken as if there were no difference between speeches in blank verse and speeches in prose. Hence it must be said that for the time being one must guard against any unqualified optimism about the effectiveness of public readings, and the need for being critical will continue until there exists for poetry as there already exists for music and the drama an independent class of performers trained in theural realization of poetry. Those who are devoted to music do not expect a great virtuoso to be a great composer, or the reverse: there is little justification for expecting the situation to be otherwise in poetry.

The purpose of my second example is to illustrate another very important change which has occurred in recent years and which makes the present state of poetry very different from what it was in the past, some twenty years ago, or for that matter forty and fifty years ago.

7:

7

In 1936 I heard Wallace Stevens, one of the best of all American poets, read his poetry at Harvard; it was the first time Stevens had ever read his poetry in public, and this first reading was at once an indescribable ordeal and a precious event to Stevens; it was precious because he had been an undergraduate at Harvard some thirty-seven years before, at the turn of the century, and he had not returned since that time in his own person, although he had often gone to the Yale-Harvard football games incognito. Before and after reading each poem, Stevens spoke of the nature of poetry, a theme which naturally concerned him very much, and he said, among other things, that the least sound counts, the least sound and the least syllable. He

illustrated this observation by telling of how he had awakened after midnight the week before and heard the sounds made by a cat walking delicately and carefully on the crusted snow outside his house. After each comment, Stevens returned to his own poems: but at one point, an old Cambridge lady, holding an ear trumpet aloft and dressed in a style which must have been chic at the inauguration of Rutherford Hayes, shouted out, hoarse and peremptory as crows, that she must ask Mr. Stevens to speak loudly and clearly, loudly and clearly, if you please. She might just as well have been shouting at President Hayes. Stevens continued to read his poems in a very low voice, although a good many of them were written in a style as

ADD Rhetoric

high-flown and passionate as that of any Elizabethan playwright. And throughout his reading Stevens was extremely nervous and constrained, although, since this state of mind showed itself only as a rigid impossibility, his overwhelming nervousness must have invisible to most of his audience. When the reading ended, Stevens said to the teacher who had introduced him: "I wonder what the boys at the office would think about this?" The office was the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., the boys were those who knew Stevens as the vice-president and legal counsel of the company and thus the most solid of citizens.

8.

A good deal more might be said about the significance of this remark and how much it helps to illuminate Stevens' poetic career and the very quality of his poetry. But right now the point which must be emphasized as much as possible is this: no poet of my own or the rising generation of poets would feel as Stevens did when he made the remark, for, among other things, if one said: "I wonder what the boys at the office would think about this", it is a matter of overwhelming probability that one one would be referring to the office of the English department at a university.

This is the change which has affected the condition of poetry more than any other during the past generation. The fact that in 1958 so many poets are teachers of literature and that in 1938, 1928 and 1908, this was very seldom true constitutes a radical change which involves not only the poet and the poetry which he writes, but the readers of poetry and their conception of the poet and of poetry. Primary and important as this change is, it cannot, however, be regarded in isolation from changes of other kinds which have also taken place and which are rooted in the changing character of American life: for example, the college-educated population of the entire country has more than doubled in two generations, and since this increase is likely to continue, more and more poets may be welcomed as teachers of literature in the colleges.

The effect upon the poet of being a teacher of literature is a complicated and independent topic; what I want to point out now is effect upon the poet's conception of himself as a poet and indeed as a human being. In the past, the poet had a sense of what he seemed to most other human beings which was identical, in one or another way, with the feelings of Wallace Stevens not only when he read his poetry for the first time in public but throughout his entire life.

Today, since so many poets are teachers, it is no longer true that the poet is regarded by most other human beings as a strange and exotic being. Moreover, as a teacher the poet makes direct use of the entire past of American and English poetry and he is in direct communication with what is known in advertising circles as a trapped audience: he has as an audience human beings at the most impressionable and receptive stage of existence, and he soon discovers that in the classroom it is possible to persuade almost all students that poetry is extremely interesting and that it is never too difficult or too obscure to be understood. This is true to such an extent that at times the problem becomes one of persuading the student that a poem is not good merely because it is difficult or bad because it is simple and immediately lucid. Indeed, this experience may encourage the most Sanguine illusions in the poet himself. He may very well forget that the conditions which exist in the classroom do not exist outside of the classroom and have he may suppose that the intense love of poetry which he has awakened with ease in his students will continue permanently. He may also suppose that the teaching of literature is sufficient in itself, granted the proper support, to create and sustain a genuinely literate reading public immune to all the corruptions of mass culture. Whether or not he suffers from these illusions, one thing is uncontestable and makes an immense difference. The poet as a teacher has a status within the confines of the academic community which gives him a very different sense of himself and a very different sense of how he is regarded by other human beings: he is a useful and accepted member of society and not a peculiar and strange being, since the writing of poetry is clearly a natural pursuit for the teacher of literature. The fact that he is a poet is not something which in itself isolates him from most other human beings, an isolation which the poet and indeed the artist in every medium felt profoundly during the past for generations.

Once a literary and poetic revolution has established itself, it is no longer revolutionary, but something very different from what it was when it had tostruggle for recognition and assert itself against the opposition of established literary authority. Thus the most skilful trait of the poetry of the rising generation of poets is the assumption as self-evident that conception of the nature of poetry which was at its inception and for years after a radical and much-disputed transformation of poetic taste and sensibility. What was once a battlefield had become a peaceful park on a pleasant summer Sunday afternoon, so that if the majority of new poets write in a style and idiom which takes as its starting point the poetic idiom and literary taste of the generation of Pound and Eliot, the motives and attitudes at the heart of the writing possess an assurance which sometimes makes their work seem tame and sedate.

Before saying more about the character of the poetry which is common to the majority of new poets, some attention must be given to the only recent new movement and counter-tendency, that of the San Francisco circle of poets who, under the leadership of Kenneth Rexroth, have recently proclaimed themselves super-Bohemians and leaders of a new poetic revolution. According to Mr. Rexroth, the new rebels are rebelling against "the highly organized academy" and literary movement employment agency of the Newantireconstructionists," the established poets and critics who care installed in the universities, and from, he says, "a dense crust of custom over the American cultural life." Since these poets recite their poems in bars and with jazz accompanists, and since one poet always calls his book of poems, "Howl," it is appropriate to refer to them as the Howlers of San Francisco as a way of labelling their leading theme, the conviction that they must scream against the conformism which prevails in society and in literary circles. The San Francisco Howlers are, however, imaginary rebels since the substance of their work is a violent advocacy of a nonconformism which they already possess and which requires no insurrection whatever since nonconformism of almost every variety had vogue for them acceptable and respectable and available to everyone. Unlike the Bohemians of the past, which has to attack the

19

in America with Russian totalitarianism in Europe. Outside of San Francisco, Mr. Rexroth declares, there is only fear and despair: "Poets are coming to San Francisco", he adds, "for the same reason. that so many Hungarians have been going to Austria recently." This is enough to make one feel that Mr. Rexroth Does not recognize the difference between the Red Army and the Kenyon Review critics, or between the political commissars of a police state and the tyrants who write advertising copy on Madison Avenue.

Ludicrous as this attitude is, it does nevertheless point to one significant way in which the international state of affairs has had a serious and adverse effect upon creative writing in America: During recent years, the leading motive of classical American literature and of twentieth century writing has been a criticism of American life. Sometimes the criticism has had a native basis: the actuality of American life has been criticized from the point of view of the American Dren. And sometimes, in expatriate writers like Henry James and T. S. Eliot, the actuality of American life has been criticized by being compared with the culture of the Old World. But since the Second World War and the beginning of the atomic age, the consciousness of the creative writer, however detached, has been confronted with the spectre of the totalitarian state, the growing poverty and helplessness of Western Europe, and the threat of an inconceivably destructive war which may annihilate civilization and mankind itself. Clearly when the future of civilization is no longer assured, a criticism of American life in terms of a contrast between avowed ideals and present actuality can hardly be a serious preoccupation and source of inspiration. For America, not Europe, is now the sanctuary of culture; civilization's very existence depends upon America, upon the actuality of American life, and not the ideals of the American Dream. To criticize the actuality upon which all hope depends thus becomes a criticism of hope itself. No matter what may be wrong with American life, it is nothing compared to the police state, barbaric my

and annihilation.

This may be the most important cause of the tameness and
the constrained calm which shows itself very often in the writing of the new
generation of poets. An anthology of the work of new poets which has recent-
ly appeared and which is called "The New Poets of England and America",
represents the character of their work as a whole very well. The editors
say in their introduction: "What characteristics are to be discovered in
the poetry of this generation, we leave the reader to discover." This recent
statement is very revealing precisely because it is so different from
the positive assertions, unquestioned convictions and intense rejections
which have, in the past, marked the emergence of a strong poetic movement,
school, or tendency.

The editors of this new anthology have restricted their
selections to the work of poets under forty, who receive the blessing,
in the form of an introduction, of Robert Frost, a very great poet
indeed, and one who is now over eighty. Mr. Frost, unlike the editors
finds some positive generalization possible about the present state of poetry.
The selections are gratifying evidence, Mr. Frost says, that "school
and poetry come near to being the same thing." And he concludes by saying
that as a result of the number of poets who have become teachers,
"in a thousand, two thousand colleges", we now have "the best audiences
poetry ever had in this world."

The characteristics which these new poets tend to have in common
are matters of both style and subject-matter. Most of these new poets
have mastered poetic form and technique to a degree superior, on the
whole, to that of any past generation. Until the generation of Pound and Eliot,
American poets were for the most part inspired amateurs, and when deserted
by inspiration, the habit of versification which they had acquired
intuitively or through reading, were too often to prevent them from writing
which was painfully slimshod, and uneven. Careless, new generation of poets.

a trained and conscious skill, a sophisticated mastery of the craft of
verification. And their professional competence may be strengthened
by the disciplined knowledge of literary form which the teacher of literature
must have.

The subject-matter of these new poets is also revealing. Thus one poem
is about a toothache; one poem is about a vacuum cleaner; and in general,
the objects and experiences of daily life, which in previous generations
were either supposed to be outside the realm of poetry or were introduced
into poetry with a conscious daring and defiance, now appear in poem
after poem in the most matter-of-fact way, as if their poetic quality
had never been denied, questioned, or regarded as outregeous. In a like
way, there is an explicitness about sexual experience without the self-
consciousness of the assertive Bohemianism which characterized the
poetry written during the first post-war period.

The perspectives which the Generation of Pound and Eliot discovered are now taken for granted: there is a clear and explicit consciousness of the international span of experience, and a pen-historical sense of culture, art, and literature which did not need to be lighted up by some act of the past. The subject-matter of a good many poems is based upon travel in Europe, but these poems view Europe in a very different way than the poet of the past. Writers like Henry James and T.S. Eliot went to Europe with a Baedeker. Writers of the generation of Ernest Hemingway and E.B. Cummings went to Europe to drive an ambulance. The new poets often consult a Baedeker, but at the same time their awareness of the international scene is such as to make them ready to drop their Baedekers at any moment and seek out an ambulance, or at least transatlantic plane reservations which will be able to bring them back to America. Thus their point of view, in general, is that of the international tourist who, as an American, regards himself as an innocent bystander in a world in which the innocent bystander

22.

22.

is continually faced by overwhelming and inexhaustible threat: in fact,
there is a sense that to be an in constant bystander is in itself one form of
guilt. The consciousness that experience is international, panhistorical,
and multi-lingual is explicit and intense to a greater degree than ever
before. Hence it can be said that in the poetry of these new poets,
English literature no longer exists as an independent entity. Whether they
are reading, writing or teaching, the text is a text in comparative
literature.

I can best summarize all that I have said so far about the
present state of poetry by quoting two very different poems. One is one
of Robert Frost's best and best-known lyrics; the other is by a poet
whose work I know only in the selections of the anthology of new poets,
the two poems are hardly comparable in poetic value, but they are worth
reading for the sake of the contrast between them, a contrast which
epitomizes the changes which have occurred in the state of poetry in
the middle of the twentieth century very different from what it was
during the first decade of the twentieth century.

## Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound is the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
But I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

to act as an editor, or to write book reviews and critical essays, the basis of his
employment is such as to enable him to earn a living. When, however, he writes a
poem, this is not true in the same way: for the most likely result of the writing
of a poem and its publication is that he will have one or another opportunity to
earn a living in some way other than that of writing poetry.

It must be said immediately that during the past twenty years the
number of prizes, awards, grants, and honors given to poets has increased a great
deal and it would be ungrateful as well as untrue to say that they have not helped
matters a good deal, and made the lot of the poet fortunate in ways which hardly
existed at all twenty and thirty years ago. At the same time it would be wrong to
suppose that the generosity with which poetry is supported does more than reduce
the problem of economics necessity, which is more difficult for the poet than for
other human beings precisely because he is a poet. During two of the past seven-
teen years, in 1940 and in 1957, I have been given sums of money sufficient to
enable me to devote myself entirely to the writing of poetry: but these grants,
which I was delighted, I need hardly say, to get, are based precisely on the fact
that it is impossible to earn even the most modest livelihood unless, in addition
to writing poetry, one does a good many other things.

The attitude of the public toward poetry and the poet is, as much
that I have said should indicate, very important too. And here again it is only
after one has taken account of positive and negative complications that one avoids
over-simplification and arrives at an adequate conclusion.

Here is a negative piece of evidence: "A recent survey showed that
sixty per cent of the adult population of America did not read a book other than
the Bible." And here is an even more negative piece of evidence: "If the Ameri-
can Festival Academy can help it, the Bard of Avon will not be the formidable bore
that he is to so many students across the land." I need not mention the measures
which are going to be taken to make Shakespeare something other than a formid-
able bore, but it is worth remarking, in passing, that if to many millions of

has made other comments of the critical kind which illustrate that fact that even
a very gifted novelist and a devoted reader may not be a desirable addition to the
reading public. Thus Mr. O'Hara spoke of how delighted and honored he was to have
the company of "a foremost intellectual like Thornton Wilder" and yet how distraught
he became when Mr. Wilder mentioned the names of Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka.
In a like way, Mr. O'Hara, reviewing a novel by Ernest Hemingway several years ago,
declared that Hemingway was the greatest writer since Shakespeare, a statement which
immediately made one wonder: what makes Shakespeare better? It also suggests that
Mr. O'Hara's disgust with Kierkegaard and Kafka may extend to Shakespeare too, or at
any rate to those modern p oets who have been influenced by Kierkegaard, Kafka, and
Shakespeare.

Mr. O'Hara's impressions as a reader are a negative illustration of
what may be most defective in the reading public's attitude toward poetry at present.
In the past, when a reader found that a poem or a novel did not interest him, he
usually said, with humility, "I don't understand; it's over my head."

During recent years and at present, more and more readers have
adopted an attitude of extreme arrogance, declaring that a poem or novel which they
were unable to understand was clearly worthless precisely because they were unable
to understand it.

The number of readers of poetry is far less important than the quality of their attitude toward poetry. One hundred thousand readers who possessed as passionate and devoted and sustained interest in the work of living poets as they possess towards a good many games, sports, and avocations, would be far more desirable than a reading public of several millions who felt that their attitude as readers was an unquestionable criterion of the value of any work of poetry or fiction.

At present, it is clear that the reading public as a whole regards
the anthology as the best of all books of poetry. And the increasing popularity of
anthologies during the past twenty years has certainly been the cause of more
anthologies and better anthologies. It remains true that the anthology is very often a
substitute for the reading of the books of any poet in particular. But again, it is
(& IS THE LAST REFUGE OF THE CRITICS)

also true that many readers of anthologies would not read contemporary poetry at all, if anthologies were not available, to them and they had to choose among the books of individual poets.

The attitude of the American public as a whole toward poetry and the poet can be further defined by describing how *Life* magazine noted the death of Dylan Thomas in the autumn of 1953 and then, a few months after, the death of Max-well Bodenheim. Thomas' death was mentioned in a brief paragraph of tribute which made one of the millions of readers or beholders of *Life* curious enough to write to the editors and ask: "Who is Dylan Thomas?" The letter was printed along with a small photograph of Thomas. Bodenheim's death, on the other hand, was the subject of two full pages of photographs and captions, reviewing Bodenheim's life for thirty years. Clearly poetic merit and fame had nothing to do with the extreme contrast, since Thomas not only was a far more important poet than Bodenheim but a far more famous one. The extreme contrast in coverage, which of course would have been reversed if poetic merit had been the criterion, has only one explanation: Bodenheim was murdered; Thomas' death was the result, on the surface at least, of what is sometimes called natural causes and thus hardly sensational enough to excite and gratify the curiosity of the vast number of human beings who look at *Life* weekly. This instance is grotesque and specially, nevertheless it certainly suggests that a poet can succeed in attracting national attention by being murdered or by being involved in some other activity of a spectacular, scandalous or extraordinary character; the intrinsic poetic value of his work is certainly not going to win him the same attention of the entire public at present or at any time in the foreseeable future.

Two further and final examples ought to complete the picture and demonstrate why any positive statement about the state of poetry at present requires a negative qualification and any negative formulation the converse, so that an adequate generalization is possible only if one can say without emotional contradiction—

tion: The present state of poetry in America is superior to what it has ever been in the past; yet at the same time, the present state of poetry is not in an unquestionable flourishing state in any full sense.

When one poet of my own generation sent a copy of his first book of poems to his brother, the received a letter of acknowledgement from which I quote only the first paragraph:

Dear Brother,

I received your book and really liked it very much except that I don't like poetry as I don't understand it. I showed your book to a few people and they were very much impressed and except for the fact that they didn't have a spare $2.50 they would have bought a copy.

This letter was written nineteen years ago: since then, it must be said again, there have continually been changes which make the present very different from the past. The far greater number of prizes, awards, grants, fellowships, public readings and recordings, and teaching appointments are the result of a public interest and solicitude which hardly existed a generation ago. Thus there are now fice major prizes for poetry each year, and there was only one, the Pulitzer Prize, twenty years ago. And this is a very important, since it does a great deal to encourage publishers to publish new books of poetry, despite the likelihood of financial loss.

But on the whole the greatly increased interest of the public is an interest in the poet far more than an interest in poetry itself. The sale of a new book of poems by most poets is but a small fraction of the number of human beings who attend poetry readings.

And this is but one indication that it is the poet, in person, as an interesting human being rather than his poetry which attracts the greater number at any poetry reading, although it is certainly true that he is regarded as an interesting only because he writes poems. So too, times agains, other poets have spoken of the experience of being invited to dinner for a week-end and being the object of the most generous hospitality solely because they were poets. They would otherwise

2.

as strongly as possible the extent to which the present state of
poetry is one of complicated transition: the profound changes which
have continually occurred during the past generation; but the
character is very often ambiguous. It is clear, for example,
that there are no new poetic movements and schools as clearly defined
as the Imagist and free verse movement of some forty years ago or
the powerful affirmation of social and political consciousness which
occurred throughout the depression.

It must be said immediately that this is true not only
of the new poets in this anthology, but of the very writers who
first became famous as advocates of political and social revolution:
Auden, Spender and C Day Lewis have for the past decade and more
written poetry which seems so unrelated in attitude and subject
to their early writing that no reader, knowing only their later works
would suspect that when they were first published they wrote
and
poems about "the death of the old gang",/the crucial urgency of the
working class revolution, attacking capitalism, racism and war, and
dismissing most other themes as, at best, unimportant. The present
dismisses
generation of poets not only/and also explicit social and
political consciousness, but shows little sign of being aware of
its sustained periods
how important that consciousness has been/to the very authors they
sometimes Auden, Yeats, Lorca, Brecht, among others.
admire and/imitate, such as/ Auden and Yeats. On the other hand,
it is entirely clear that another revolution, one which began long
before the social and economic crisis of the depression, has
continued all the while. I mean the poetic revolution, the revolution
in taste which was inspired by the criticism of T.S.Eliot

Perhaps the most direct way in which I can deal with the subject of tonight's lecture is to draw upon my own experience while I draw upon my own experience and the experience of others of my own generation of writers. And insofar as I speak of my own personal experience or that of others, it is because I feel no doubt whatever that it can be said to be typical without any qualification whatever.

Since my first book of poems was published almost twenty years ago, I have been fortunate in ways which were seldom or never true during previous generations. I have been appointed to teach in many colleges, and I have been an editor of teaching posts, and I have been employed as a lecturer, an editor, and

and in general provided with a good deal a literary consultant, of work which I think I probably would not have asked to do if I had not been a poet. And I am sure, I must say again, that this is true of my fellows: we have been asked to do a good many things which, at the start, at any rate, we qualified only because we wrote poetry. The one thing which we were not asked to do very often--I will speak of the exceptions to this statement in a moment--was to write poetry. Let me try to be as concrete as possible about what I mean. Like my fellowpoets, I have often been asked to write book reviews and essays in literary journals, and I have done so for economic and other reasons. I have written a good many book reviews and essays in literary criticism. In the same way, American

I have taught English composition, English/literature, Creative Writing, and I have taught at several colleges, and I must say again that I doubt very much whether it would have occurred to anyone to invite me to teach, if I had not written poetry. Now if I compare the number of poems that I have been asked to teach or to write literary criticism with the number of times that I have been asked, on the same or like basis, to write a poem, the contrast is

The most direct

One way in which I can discuss the subject of to-
night's lecture is that of citing a series of examples
drawn from the experience of my own generation and part-
icularly by speaking of my own experiences as a critic, an
editor, and a teacher, whom I consider as a poet

As a critic, one must of course write
poems about other poets; as an editor, one must choose among
for publication; and as a teacher one has students who
in advertising circles constitute what is known in other circles as "a trapped
audience", the audience of a classroom of undergraduates
whom whom one can persuade, by virtue of one's authority,
as a teacher, to read poetry of every variety. Each of these
jobs provides one with different and meaningful evidence as to
the status of that poetry and of the poet. But before speaking
of that evidence, it is important, first of all, to emphasize
a fact which helps very much to distinguish the status of
poetry and the poet in America at present from what it has
been in the past, the fact that most of the poets of my
generation who have had the experience of performing these
tasks, have been given the opportunity to perform them
because they had written poetry and it is extremely likely
that some of them, --this is certainly true of myself--would not
have been that

it

Some day I may strike it rich out here in California and when I do, your economic problems will be at end and you can write poems day and night as long as you don't read them aloud to me.

Must stop now. I have to make a train and go up the coast to San Francisco. The only thing I don't like about California is that you're not here

Your brother and
former sidekick,

Kenneth

Now I think that I must underscore the fact that this letter was written some twenty years ago; and I must add that it is not in the least ironic or hostile in intention. The date is important because it marks a period during the depression when it was far difficult to get books of verse published e-to say nothing of buying them.

A great many things have happened since that letter was written. The number of little magazines for example is so numerous that one is h聘td to say that there are good periods than good poems or at least good poems to publish. Poets are honored and regarded as never before, since the birth of the republic: they receive the most gratifying honors, in the form of awards, prizes, teaching appointments, fellowships, grants and the like. It is obvious that the American public no longer regards as for long it did, the poet as a peculiar and eccentric being who is not--if I may use a dreadful phrase--socially acceptable, fit for decent society. This change has occurred during the past generation and no poet would honestly deny that it is an extremely pleasant thing. But at the same time if it is clear that the public moves and admires poets, it is content

16.

who read books would be lowered by excluding paperbacks from the count.
Whitman's dictum, which has long been the motto of Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse--"To have great poets one must have great audiences -- is true, if
taken in any numerical sense, a sense hardly to be excluded when it is
the aphorism of the laureate of democracy, would thus compel one to conclude
that the absence of a great audience, and the indifference of a major poet
of the population to poetry made great poets and great poetry unlikely at
present. To come to such a conclusion would be just as false as to conclude
that the contrary was true and that the reading public's attitude toward
was either all that it might be or are meant to the present state of
poetry.

as the stakeholders
in the rendering
public

poetry.

Here however, is a second piece of evidence of the same kind which
is worth citing so that it will be clear that the attitude of the public
toward poetry is not the result of the inferior character or obscurity of
modern poetry, a view which tends to become more/prevalent among those who
read less and less poetry or none at all:

(NYTTimes: 12:29:57)

"If the American Shakespeare Festival's Academy can help it
the Bard of Avon will not be the formidable bore he is to so many students
across the land.

The subject of tonight's lecture, the condition of poetry in America, at present, in the middle of the twentieth century, can be dealt with in a number of ways. No one way is likely to be entirely adequate because the condition of poetry at any time depends upon matters which must be considered separately, but which, when considered separately, are bound to be misleading. Thus, the attitude of the reading public must certainly be regarded as relevant to the situation of poetry and the condition of the poet at any particular time. But a survey made last year of the habits of the public resulted in the following incontestable conclusions: *AUTO MOBILES* '55,000,000 (ARS IN THE U.S.A.).

"The habit of reading is not keeping pace with increased education, leisure time or high disposable income. Sixty percent of the adult population of America did not read a book other than the Bible, during 1954. Half of the adults in this country live within a mile of a public library, yet only one fifth of them visit it."

It should be obvious that the statistical figures I have just quoted would be even more one-sided if they were I have just quoted would be even more one-sided if they had restructured itself to the number of adults in America who read a book of poetry during 1954 just as they would become even more extreme if all paperback books had been excluded, *forever*, one believes, as I suppose many do, from the count. And if *forever*

that Walt Whitman was right when he said, "I have great poets, one must great audiences", then one would have to conclude that poetry was not in a flourishing condition at present and it was unlikely that very much first rate poetry was being written *forever* or was going to be written. To come to such a conclusion, however, would be just as mistaken as to conclude that the contrary was true and that *THE CONDITION OF POETRY*

13.

I have been given for time to time, almost all of them being given to me because I was to poetry. The important point, however, is that I had to earn my living

in the variety of ways which I have just barely listed, working at jobs other the job and the vocation of being a poet and writing poetry; at the same time, it is extremely unlikely that I would have had asked to do the jobs at all if I had been a poet and published my first book of poems before I was given the opportunity to earn my living in one or another of a variety of ways. It may not be as true of others as of myself that my sole qualification at the outset, and very often at other times, was the fact that I was a poet and would have been otherwise unknown to me.

I must also add that during two of the past twenty years, in 1940 and again, after seventeen years, in 1957, I have been the recipient of grants of money sufficient and intended to provide me with a livelihood for an entire year's time during which I was free to devote myself entirely to the writing of poetry. For various reasons which are far more personal than typical, I was not able to make the most of the freedom I have been given so generously, but nevertheless during both years I wrote a good deal more poetry than during at any other time, and was more satisfied with what I had written than at any other time.

One reason for this, at least, is not making as much as I should have of these years of grace is worth mentioning briefly, since it is certainly enough of a great many other writers, older, younger and of the same generation as myself, to make the fact that a year is not a period of time which can be wholly isolated from other years to come, one cannot disregard the fact that in most years to come, as in the past, to be a poet means an important renunciation which does not hold of all vocations: it means that there is little hope or none of being able to earn a living directly by the writing of poetry; this has been true, during the past too often, although not always in the same ways or under the same conditions. Thus Dryden speaks of not having the vocation to scribble. It is difficult to think

2.

At various times, editors have asked me if I had extreme.
 publication andx Moreover, in 1940

any new work to submit, andxixhaxxxhaxxxgivexxtwo
andxxt, and again, in 1957, I was delighted recipient of
Guggenheim andxhaxxxexxx

Slyenker year later

intended

Guggenheim and Kenyon Review awards

which provided sums of

a sufficient sum

money sufficient to devote oneself for an entire year to

the writing of one try. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXX various

In addition to these grants,

which are based precisely on the fact that it is impossible for
a poet to earn the most modest living by the writing of poetry,
there are a good many other honors and prizes of various

kinds: it would be ungrateful as well as false to say that
these are not very helpful and very pleasing; at the same time,
it would be equally false to say that

these are not very helpful and very pleasing; at the same time,
it would be equally false to say that
these honors
extent to which XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
are irrelevant to the primary problem of the poet, the
WRITING WRITING WRITING

by doing a great deal of work

necessity of earning a living XXXXXXXXXXXX inXXXIXXthekhxxxthan
WRITING WRITING WRITING

WRITING WRITING WRITING

which deprives him to one or another degree of the time he

needs for the writing of one try.

On a number of other occasions, some of them fairly recent, some of them very long ago, I have written or spoken, or I have heard what others have written and spoken about the subject of tonight's lecture, the condition of poetry in America at present. I intend to describe some of these occasions in a while, but right now, as a starting point, it is important to say that the present occasion is quite different from every past occasion, although the subject is the same; and all those past occasions seem quite different now than at the time that they occurred.

In the past, there has been little or no reason to feel as I felt when I, in preparing to speak tonight, I reviewed the subject in my mind. For as I thought of the present state of poetry in America, in the middle of the twentieth century, I had two very unlike and wholly conflicting impressions. One impression was that of bewilderment and reminded me of a film I once saw in which a minor but complicated character, whenever anyone said to him: "How are you?", invariably replied: "I don't know". So far as I can remember, this answer displeased everyone else: some were irritated, others were infuriated, no one was satisfied, and yet there was more to the answer than a simple statement of ignorance or a simple unwillingness to make a clear and unequivocal statement about one's state of being, and this was made evident when one irritated questioner said: "What do you mean, you don't know how you are?" When one says, "I don't know," whether one is speaking of one's state of being or one is speaking of the state of poetry, the answer possesses genuine accuracy. It would be inaccurate to say that poetry at present is a state of perfect health; at this time, it would be still more inaccurate to say that it was in a state of illness and decline, unless it has been, from time to time, during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first fourteen years of the twentieth century. Perhaps to say that the condition of poetry at present

and a precious occasion to him: it was precious because he had been an
undergraduate at Harvard some thirty seven years before and he had not
returned since then, in his own person, although he had often gone to the
Yale-Harvard football games incognito. Before and after reading each poem, Stevens
spoke of the nature of poetry, a theme which very naturally had concerned
him very much, and he said, among other things, that the least sound counts
the least sound and the least syllable. He illustrated this observation
by telling of how he had wakened after midnight that week and heard the
sounds made by a cat walking delicately and carefully on the crusted snow
outside his house. After each comment, Stevens returned to his typescript,
which had had been prepared and bound for the reading with a fabulous
elegance which was characteristic of him:
but an old Cambridge lady, holding an
ear trumpet aloft and dressed in a style which must have been chic at the
inauguration of Rutherford Hayes, shouted out, hoarse and rememptory as
crows, that she must ask Mr. Stevens to speak loudly and clearly, loudly
and clearly, if you please. She might just as well have been shouting
at President Hayes. Stevens continued to read his poems in a very low voice.
And throughout the reading Stevens was extremely nervous and constrained,
although since this showed itself only as a rigid impassivity, his
overwhelming nervousness must have been invisible to a good deal of the
audience. When the reading had been concluded, Stevens said to the
teacher who had introduced him: "I wonder what the boys at the office would
think about?". The office was the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., the
boys were those who knew him as a vice-president, a lawyer and the most
solid of citizens.

Something more must be said about Stevens' remark and his insignificance in relation to his poetic career, but for the moment the point on which it is important to place as much emphasis as possible is this: no point of

["split of citizenship in relation to his health career, and for the income\npiles were there who knew him as a vice-president, a secretary of the\nPresident who had introduced him: \"If I wonder what the pokes of the office would\nbe, I know that I am a vice-president.\" The office was the Hartford Academic and Indemnity Co., the\nthink about it.\" The office was the Hartford Academic and Indemnity Co., the\nPresident who had introduced him: \"If I wonder what the pokes of the office would\nbe, I know that I am a vice-president, a secretary of the\nPresident who had introduced him: \"If I wonder what the pokes of the office would\nbe, I know that I am a vice-president,

The effort to collect one's thoughts sufficiently to write a summery of the year's poetry occasioned so many renewed or new observation that they became a necessary preface of the state of poetry at present that they seem a necessary preface moving the utmost relevance to the vbooks summit review. These general reflections were set in motion by the fact that so many books of poetry had been appeared in 1955 that an effort on the part of a journal like

like Jjournalsto review lal of them indetial dand thus with justice would leave very little the room for other matters. In a like way, to attempt to read all of them with the devoted attention which they deserve--and which the critics of poetry, so often a poet himself, expects for his own work--would require so much time that there would be little left for less exalted matters, forearning a living, to be trike the sordid note first, and for being a human being as well as a critic, if it is possible indeed to be much of a poet or critic while tedious or exluding and to other human involvements.

The poet and critic suffers a limitation of energy which is the counterpart to that of the public: