Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke

forth on

      them.

      The great steamroller of political and economic necessities which has been flattening us out may prevent the general public, and even many poets, from feeling the full value of Miss Moore’s work. Her linguistic subtlety may often be lost on those who were not listening attentively enough to be surprised. Her deft invention of something that might be called the “poetic editorial” may not communicate its savor to us after we have been too violently assailed by the “big bow wow stuff” all about us. And if we read hastily, her conversational understatement may conceal from us the range and boldness of her responsiveness, as in her astounding poem, “An Octopus of Ice.” In his introduction to the volume, T. S. Eliot selects the word genuineness as the mark of her work. Greatness, he says, is a quality for the future to decide upon—but the genuineness of a work can be discerned by an author’s contemporaries. At a time when people are everywhere climbing upon bandwagons, let me hasten on this issue at least, to climb upon a bandwagon with Mr. Eliot. He writes: “The genuineness of poetry is something which we have warrant for believing that a small number, but only a small number, of contemporary readers can recognize.” I wish hereby to enlist formally in this distinguished company—and to state my conviction that all those of Miss Moore’s Guild, all poets of all persuasions, should vote with me and Eliot for Miss Moore’s genuineness.

      It is not merely a correspondence of name that takes me next to Six Sides to a Man, a collection of sonnets by Merrill Moore, with an “Epilogue, by way of advertisement,” by Louis Untermeyer. I should not dare to call Merrill Moore a steamroller, after the mean things that have been said about one—and I will admit that nearly every writer must seem somewhat blunt if we pick up his work just after laying down Miss Moore’s—but his gusto and dash are wholly the opposite of Miss Moore’s meticulousness. Mr. Untermeyer, writing less as editor and critic than as accountant, calculates that Dr. Moore, who is now thirty-one, has written “approximately twenty-five thousand idiomatic, hybrid, or ‘American’ sonnets.” These sonnets suffer considerably from lack of revision—but if you read them as hastily as they were written, hurrying rapidly from one to the next, you will gradually come to see a “way of life” emerging, as the poet details the incidents of his day with an almost gluttonous curiosity. It is modesty on his part to call himself but six-sided. He seems to have as many sides as there are subjects—and what we get is a sequence of quick, haphazard matchings, for he has learned to be engrossed in experience as a clutter. That is: by finding things very noteworthy, he can avoid the discouragement of those who find things very disordered. This mode of “acceptance” may go far to explain his great vitality.

      Dr. Moore is a kind of urban Jesse Stuart. Like the author of Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow, he mars the sonnet (the most statuesque of forms) by adapting it to the conveniences of completely impromptu statements, getting something that has fourteen lines, with approximately ten syllables to the line, but is otherwise wholly free to follow the dictates of accident. And he writes with the same rough spontaneity as Jesse Stuart (“blurt out your dreams”), though the world of the Kentucky mountaineer is a much simpler one—and whereas Stuart does not revise because of naïvete, Moore probably forgoes revision because of restlessness. Moore speculates easily on much that Stuart would tend to lump together as a vague forbidding Shape, to be hated as it encroached upon the simplicities of his people, who resent the abstractions of politics, finance, and the law, and who in maturity ask the same protectiveness of the soil as a mother provided them in childhood. “Love in the flesh is greater than the mind,” writes Stuart, all of whose poems spring from the most concrete of facts. And it should be noted that this rustic poet, unlike most urbanized poets of the soil, writes poems as full of characters as a novel. Nature for him does not point towards privacy and remoteness, but towards the barn dance. This mind that yields to reverie as it follows the turning sod is well stocked with gossip and local lore, in which the inhabitants of the graveyard still figure because their stories remain a vital part of the community.

      The other aspect of Nature (as a place of symbolic communion for a man essentially lonely) is to be found in Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s Strange Holiness. Mr. Coffin has something of Miss Moore’s engrossment in the fastidious ways of animals—but whereas she can consider them primarily as connoisseur, Mr. Coffin for all his admiration remembers that on occasion he must destroy them, when they threaten to crowd him from his farm. His poem, “The Haters,” recounting the forms of life (the “dispossessed”) that struggle to assert themselves in opposition to his plans and purposes (“It is by the cellar they come first”) perhaps gives most clearly the quality of his mind, the way in which comfort and discomfort, kindness and cruelty, are intermingled for him. The poet is made devout by the look of terror in a shot or frightened animal’s eye. He can convey to us, quite solemnly, the uneasy expectancy of a summer night, as a storm slowly approaches. The pleasures he celebrates have a touch of melancholy, even when he notes the

      Gentle purrs that came and went

      In the cat stretched out content.

      Almost persecutionally encircling him, there is the burning animation of non-human life. Hence he can write a brilliant lyric on bees, “shooting hot from flower to flower”; and his contemplative tributes to a cow being milked are very moving. In “First Flight” he characteristically employs the narrative of an airplane ride purely as a means of reaffirming in a new way his attachment to the soil. Only occasionally does his somber mythology get too much for us: we may accept it that the spider is not unkind, but simply industrious and scrupulous in her fashion—yet he does perhaps strain at our limits of endurance when suggesting, in his poem “The Bull Inside,” that this turbulent animal has accepted a check upon himself, somewhat in line with neo-Humanist doctrines of decorum, “for the sake of small calves to come.” And there are times when his sense of natural awesomeness makes us realize why men have been driven to machines, business, finance, and the state, whereby they may, with distinct relief, contemplate not mystery, but either craft or quackery, not sacrosanct wisdom the thought of which makes us breathe wrong, but the foibles of comedy—not man in nature, but man in society.

      Indeed, one might roughly distinguish the tragic from the comic by saying that the tragic deals with man in nature, while the picture of man in society is comic. But one should have to modify this statement forthwith, by admitting that the materials of comedy themselves become tragic when some aspect of society is treated as a force. The distinction applies to Archibald MacLeish’s new play in verse, Panic, which has for its subject a phenomenon so essentially social as a collapse in our financial institutions, yet contrives to give the theme a fully tragic quality. One could only guess why an author as well acquainted with business phenomena as MacLeish, an editor of Fortune, should choose to picture a Wall Street crash in so magical a fashion. It is possible that the almost religious accents of fatality present here stem from some desire for symbolic self-immolation on the part of the author. This poem is not written to herald the rise of the masses, but as a dirge for the fall of a banker. The Marxian “scientific” prophecies of capitalist decay are transformed into the tonalities of a Shakespearean soothsayer, or a mystic foreboding of death such as permeates the opening of a play by Maeterlinck. The only fully developed characters are the banker McGafferty and his mistress Ione—and as a matter of fact, one of the most effective scenes in the play profits by the contrast between the super-personal or non-personal quality of the plot in general and the intimate conversation of this couple (the interweaving of private relationships and broad historic trends such as distinguishes Malraux’s novel of the Chinese revolution, Man’s Fate).

      No one seems to have noted how greatly the role of the messenger in Greek drama has been magnified in Panic. The course of the action is maintained by a steady bombardment of news: as read aloud by a throng “in a street before an electric news bulletin of the Times Square type—moving words in lighted letters,” as read from the tape of the ticker in McGafferty’s office, and as received by telephone. While all the world collapses, the organized distribution of public intelligence remains in perfect order. Indeed, we have scarcely witnessed the grim intrusion of The Blind Man and his radical companions in McGafferty’s office, before we hear the voices of the people in the street reading the same information from the flicker of the news bulletin. Reports continue to pour in, until the banker finally wilts before the suggestiveness of their climactic arrangement. The logic of