Kenneth Fearing, whose book is very accurately located by Edward Dahlberg’s introduction, is almost the exact fit for our needs of the moment. For this reason, like a cartoonist he is limited in the range of his devices—but within this range he attains great suavity (the tonality of plaint and brooding that underlies his slang making for ceremoniousness). And there is no contemporary poet who is neater at noting with ironic corrosion the grotesque injustices of our ailing economic structure, in the “flophouse, workhouse, warehouse, whorehouse, bughouse life of man.”
Return After Flight
Theory of Flight by Muriel Rukeyser. Foreword by Stephen Vincent Benet. Yale UP
The New Masses, February 1936, 26
If one would find corroboration for the thesis that even the most practical of acts may have symbolic features, one should certainly examine this interesting volume of poems by Murial Rukeyser. The formal poet might make a poem of airplane flight, in which by his choice of imagery he conveyed the emotional overtones the act of airplane flight had for him. Or the practical mechanic might write of flying, purely by way of contributing to the data of aeronautics. But in Murial Rukeyser we find a clear convergence of the two. She made a practical study of the subject; and at the same time she felt the symbolic aspects of her interest.
The result is a work that can awaken, in the sympathetic reader, a profound responsiveness.
And the record of her experience, though told in a concatenation of isolated poems, is very close to the heart of drama. We get first a kind of long preamble, a collection under the general head, “Poem Out of Childhood.” It shows, as it were, her “preparation,” the quality of experience that made the thought of flying be the appropriate answer to her moods. It is only in the dramatic sense that we could call them poems of “childhood” as regards the section following, the “Theory of Flight” proper.
As we read through this second section, we begin to see emerging the modes of this strange initiation rite she has imposed upon herself. From a distance, she surveys the cruelty and arduousness of the contemporary world. At once aloof and observant, she comes upon an attitude that duplicates, in her own immediate terms, the educative passing of Dante through hell. And quite in keeping with the materials of thought uppermost today, it is the airplane motor that takes over the protective role of Virgil as her guide.
Thus, as we begin to feel stirred when we observe the import of the verses that close the purgatorial journey. “Flight is intolerable contradiction,” she says—the very choice of the word “contradiction” giving us some clue as to the remade nature of her mind. “We bear the bursting seeds of our return.” And she concludes, in lines that, while good in themselves, become magnificent in their context:
Now we can look at our subtle jointures, study our hands, the tools are assembled, the maps unrolled, propellers spun, do we say all is in readiness:
the times approach, here is the signal shock:?
Master in the plane shouts “Contact”:
master on the ground: “Contact!”
he looks up: “Now?” whispering “Now.”
“Yes,” she says. “Do.”
Say yes, people.
Say yes.
YES.
For what has she thus symbolically prepared herself? We learn in the last poem of the book, “The Blood is Justified.”
The range of relevant material she handles, in making this work an experience involving the entire personality and not merely a schematically “before and after” object lesson for schoolboys, is imposing in its richness. She remains competent and composed, even in the dangerous regions of magic: blood, fire, the pit, the father, the owning of names, ritual, the abyss-motif of perspective, the “going round and around” in the swing-music of the gyroscope, the upper and nether spheres, the mounting of stairs—all these secret ingredients are called upon, along with an affectionateness that evokes our confidence.
In having such a writer on their side, Communists have a worthy ally.
The Hope in Tragedy
Chorus for Survival by Horace Gregory. Covici, Friede
Poetry, July 1935, 227–230
When we consider the great proportion of urban material embodied in Gregory’s work, it may seem perverse of a critic to call the basic patterns of this poet’s mind agrarian. Yet there is a sense in which the adjective applies almost as well to him as to the writer whose work seems to have had most effect in shaping him, D. H. Lawrence (a master whose significant vices Gregory has avoided with phenomenal tact). By an agrarian pattern of mind I mean a marked sense of periodic recurrence, of seasonal repetitions—observation largely shaped by the feeling that what has been still is and will be. In the typical urban attitude, history is a straight line, moving ever onward, leaving old things behind it, and coming into regions wholly new. It is “progressive,” whereas the agrarian attitude is cyclical.
Motivated by the mystery of the seed, with its confluence of past, present, and future (life as born of death), the agrarian pattern is in essence tragic. Its concern with problems of rebirth makes for many variants of the Phoenix symbol. And we may expect to find here, in one guise or another, the vision of a marmorean Atlantis that lies, still perfect, its palaces intact, its marbles posturing in heavy twilight, at the bottom of the sea.
The agrarian pattern is that of the “Eternal Now.” It brings the past to us, not as of antiquarian interest, as a collection of curios in a museum, but as another version of the present. The events of today, however concretely noted (and Gregory can note them as concretely as does any barrister’s indictment before a Grand Jury) are at the same time fused with a sense of long perspective, whereby the poet is close-to and remote-from simultaneously. In his case, a specific intimate event, existing in its particularities but once, is reported with an overtone of migrations and historic sweeps. The poet observes through a screen of myth, so that what he sees bears the markings of this screen upon it. (The result is not “illusion,” since the sense of relationship embodied in the myth is as “real” as anything else in the universe.) Thus, Gregory is realistic and visionary at once, noting accurately, almost photographically, while his “metaphysical head” remembers that the ocean’s roll and the expanse of continents lie significantly about the fringes of his details. Historic telescoping comes natural to him:
New York closed into Rome, Rome into Egypt, Cosmopolis, and only darkness there.
Having called him tragic, we might define our meaning further by distinguishing between the tragic and the hygienic. The hygienic would solve all problems by sterilization. Is one beset? Locate the germ, and kill it. The tragic attitude, based upon the mysteries of the seed, of life-from-death, cannot accept the methods of hygiene as a solution for our fundamental ills. Within the frame of the tragic attitude, we do not seek to sterilize our aberrations, but to harness them, to make them serve, and with the help of criticism to build assets out of liabilities. It would sluice the demonic lightning into wires; it would control by reins.
For such reasons, Gregory’s poetry is not always accepted by his political allies as assisting their immediate purposes. At first glance, the tragic attitude can appear to make for an acceptance of institutional maladjustments whereby the investor should “resign himself” in the most approved classic manner, to the burden of clipping coupons, and the impoverished, who cannot share