"We Love Nothing But the Perfect": A Further Response to The Minnesota Review's Questionnaire On Marxism and the Arts

CORRESPONDENCE 139 correspondence "We Love Nothing But the Perfect": A Further Response to The Minnesota Review's Questionnaire On Marxism and the Arts One of the first important lessons that the careful student both of Uterature and ideology learns is to look for what is not written in a given text. Thus, one startling absence that may be found among the poets' responses to The Minnesota Review's questionnaire is the lack of answers to the question "What are the strengths and/or weaknesses of our bourgeois cultural heritage?" Likewise, noticeably absent was any detailed reference to the tradition of EngUsh and American verse (whether for criticism or praise), and indeed, very much quotation from poetic models at aU. Clearly, the poets of the left in America today display a great ambivalence, if not a downright distrust of their tradition, which, regardless of the ideological positions of individual poets, is a tradition of the creation of perfection. That such a term seems aüen to leftwing poets today (to say nothing of their bourgeois contemporaries), yet remained in the vocabulary of such a "suspect" precursor as W. B. Yeats, indicates a decided case of short-sightedness on the part of the present generation. This short-sightedness, itself due to the most wretched failings of the bourgeois world outlook (i.e., empiricism, positivism, a complete reliance on immediate experience) in turn provides sufficient reason for the almost complete faUure of the present generation to create genuine lyric poetry-a criticism, sadly enough, that must be leveUed at the poetry recently appearing in The Minnesota Review. It could be caUed a matter of the spirit, if one were not too concerned with accusations of "ideaUsm" to refrain from using the term. It was only after twenty years of süence, while he worked in the Communist Party, that George Oppen could write of the poets in his greatest poem, "Of Being Numerous," that They have lost the metaphysical sense Of the future, they feel themselves The end of a chain and instead declare "Only that it should be beautiful." Such a recognition seems lacking in the response of the poets to the questionnaire, and if their commitment is to be praised, then their ignorance of the imaginative process is to be criticized. It is not to say, as does Harold Bloom, that the dialectics of history are not those of art, but rather, to say again with Oppen, that the poet "must somehow see the one thing." Frederic Jameson, in his answer to the questionnaire, has perhaps come closest to the source of the problem: The very difficulty of modern poetry is in direct proportion to the degree of reification of everyday speech; and the simphcity of much poetry today, in the tradition of WilUam Carlos WUUams, is itself a second-degree phenomenon which buUds on the complexity of the first wave of poetic modernism. The simpUcity that Jameson identifies must be seen for what it is. If the everyday speech that the left-wing poet seeks to use (for through such speech, wiU his poems not 140 THEMINNESOTA REVIEW be accessible to the "workers"?) has become increasingly reified, then such language cannot possibly serve as the medium for a truly sociaUst poetry, the subject of which must always be perfection. Creative mentation, which for the poet means bringing to bear the imagination on the objects of immediate expedience, is a complex process, it must be honed dialectically; it too must be complex. In this struggle of poetry to create perfection, it resists the pressures of bourgeois culture to transform it into a reified entity, a commodity, which it wUl become if it attempts to Umit itself to "real" objects and "real" experiences in a "real" world. It WiU become the thing it most despises, for aU its commitment to the struggle for human Uberation. But if the poets of the left today embrace their imaginative capacities and free themselves from their immediate poUtical concerns, then they can declare, along with William Bronk (who is himself not a "Marxist" poet): If I am anything at aU, I am the instrument of the world's passion and not the doer or the done...