Reply : Focus

1. Typical is a bad word, there are only poems, one at a time. The only work that might bear the word "typical" would, I am sure, be a mediocre one. First rate poems stand by themselves.

BUT to imagine that any work, Greek, Latin, British, Irish or American can be conceived of as in vacuuo is idiotic. Every work created in any environment is compact of that environment in all its diverse appearances since any work of art is sensual in its nature and we can only know and present as artists what we sensually perceive in the character in which we perceive it. Thus any art or work of art is always local and only national in its character by accident.

When a Frenchman visits the United States, as many did during the recent war, does he write like an American? Of course not - his "locality" is still France just as most of us feel here that Auden's locality is still England. He is struggling hard, so we are told, but I for one doubt that he will ever get to the bottom of his difficulty and write an American poem. It would be too much to expect of him.

Any poem, we're talking of excellence, written in the American locale or climate, if you prefer, will have compact in it all those characterists, psychological and otherwise, intonations, use of words differing from British use which make our lives here of a separate character than the British equivalent. To that extent, excellence or the lack of it being equal, one might well speak of a "typical American poem" - reserving always what I have said above as to the use of the word "typical".

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In British poetic usage there is locked the British Empire; I hope we have nothing of that here. If we do have that here then to that extent our poems would be unamerican. You have, of course, acquired T.S. Eliot from us; my own opinion of Eliot is that he was antipathetic to that which would have been required of him to be a first rate American poet - or, rather, to write a first rate American poem. Between Eliot and Auden lies a mountain of effort which neither for opposite reasons will climb. I have no objections; each will, I am sure, do something else, has in fact done much else excellently - but there is much else to be done here.

2. My own feelings concerning the language of American poetry as it differs and might differ from standard, present-day British usage are of a basic nature. Our language is our own, it has no relation, except an accidental one, to English. We only make asses of ourselves when we teach "English" in our schools. But that is a small matter. The important thing is to use any language

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tactically, sensually

( 25 hours later - 15 minutes to myself - one of them used up now : the violence of my life at least serves to break up some overly devoted moods and give me a fresh start )

I do not wish to belabor the point of a possible relationship between a prosody and a corresponding political-social make-up but in one aspect the British social fabric and its prosody are identical, both are for us here in America useless. We get a picture of the thing, a summation, in the pathetic sonneteer, a definite psychologic group that has been thoroughly catalogued and discounted. That is, naturally, an extreme type but it serves, I hope, to emphasize my point.

We need a new prosody as much as we need a new social understanding - an expanded prosody, an enormously expanded understanding of the "metrical core of speech" as Grover I. Jacoby, Jr., editor of his free verse magazine *Variegation* (Variegation Publishing Co., 124 West 4th Street, Los Angeles 13, California.) has phrased it.

The Ptolomeic System is no more antiquated to astronomy than the present prosody is to our understanding of the poem today. Not, mind you, that much of the past generally is immutable but it has so long thwarted the imagination in the name of stability that we don't even dare to think beyond it in many cases.

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I am certain that the American environment offers a far more labile opportunity for an really basic opening up of the prosodic rules than does the British today. In any case we might as well go on with our investigations and observations here without paying much attention to what the British may conceivable be doing - if at all - better than we.

I myself feel that the really sweeping enlargements of opportunity in measure, in the making of the poem, the opening up of the field, will come with structural changes - growing out of what began as free verse. I must quit trying to write an essay.

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To attempt to answer your second question directly: differences in the use of vocabulary, metric, cadences, syntax, punctuation as between English and the American language are in themselves largely fortuitous. That is to say, many such differences are purely accidental and of no specific influence. However, if stability of vocabulary, use of vocabulary, cadence and so forth becomes a barrier to the development of new prosodic resources, then and to the extent that a stasis is induced by conventional practice, the trend which breaks away from that convention by discarding the old is the trend that will appeal most to the American. In that case and in that light the differences between English and American as two languages diverging from a single root are basic. Basic because it shows the nature of the two characters involved, in their differences as well as their objectives. #

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The measure remains in this in all other matters under discussion here: What advances toward a new and expanded prosody are involved? If changes in vocabulary, use of vocabulary, cadences and so forth have advanced us or might devance us toward that they are important, otherwise not.

3. American poems that I read have not been affected by those trends in English poetry in the thirties typified by the work of Auden, Spender, Day Lewis and MacNeice - because such work is unrelated to the work that lies before us. We enjoy such poems as you speak of but find them completely foreign - as we found the work of Eliot foreign in its implications. Eliot's worked stopped the development of American poetry for over twenty years by the tremendous popular success of its mannerisms. His influence here today is paltry though there is no one in America who does not acknowledge his skill or in fact who does not take pleasure in his successes. We have learned, however, not to be thrown off our gait by him. The same would apply to the work of the poems mentioned above.

You see, consciously or unconsciously, the American must work toward a present, a local necessity. This necessity is precisely the same as that which animated Athens, Rome or whatever other locality you may wish to name, present day London among the rest. Each man uses what he has for his consortuctions. This promises that the materia of each is different from the materia of the *materia of other* *in* *other* places and ages. Usually there is a competition for excellence in the world which - whether we like it or not - has run parallel to world dominance.

Anyhow, I see little influence of recent British poets here. We like them but we are not diverted by them from more important work.

4. No, I see no effect of the romanticism now prevalent, you say, in English poetry - here. BUT, influence or no influence, everyone who has read it is bowled over by Miss Edith Sitwell's recent work. And there you have it. Should we do anything more, after our unstinted enjoyment, than marvel at the work of this woman? And when we have done that should we not look about to see whether or not we have anything comparable in excellence to present here? And see our lack what more is there for us to do than to apply ourselves anew to our difficulties in order to try as we may to make of our own materials anything so successful and so fine. Much that is purely British has gone into the making of such work as Miss Sitwell has given us. What difference does it make that it is British or otherwise? It is magnificently realized, that is all that matters in the end; it arose in a certain place, out of that place - a thousand facets of english thought and history are revealed in it - but once it has taken wing it becomes universal and thus the place has at last immortalized itself. Much else could be said of Miss Sitwell's work - as the work of a woman in particular, as of what influence the work of other women have had on her, beginning with Sappho - but I think this is a subject concerning which we had better look to Homer for light.