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 when they occurred.

In the past, there has been little or no reason to feel as I felt when, 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 Revivalism 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 dispirited 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 sometimes possesses a genuine accuracy. It would be inaccurate to say that poetry at present is a state of perfect health; at the same time, it

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would be still more inaccurate to say that it was in a state of
severe illness or decline, as 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 is one of complicated transition is the closest one
can come to a positive statement. But one must immediately add that
it is in a state of transition of a special and new kind, a state of
groping and uncertainty. It should be almost needless to say that
this attitude toward the present is not limited to poets and the
condition of poetry, nor is it confined to the U.S. The second strong
feeling which tonight's subject repeatedly suggested to me was not in
the least a sense of doubt and perplexity, but on the contrary it
was very much of an embarrassment of riches: I felt as I think
Baudelaire must have felt when he wrote, in one of his best poems, "I
have more memories then if I had lived for a thousand years!" There
are various reasons for this abundance and excess of memory, which is
common, I feel almost certain, to all the poets of my own generation,
and particularly true of those who like myself have been critics,
teachers, editors as well as poets. So many changes have occurred
since the time when we were adolescents, the time when it seemed the
most wonderful thing in the world to be a poet, when any older person
who had appeared in print seemed to have a God-like aura, a super-
natural radiance, and when the experience of reading the work of
older poets was the cause of overwhelming excitement, and at times,
indeed, of an intense exaltation comparable to no other kind of ex-
perience, however pleasant or joyous.

For the poets of my own generation as for myself, some
twenty five or thirty years of chronological time have passed since