[In the following essay, Fiedler states that of the poets of their generation, history will likely give Robert Frost the popular acclaim and Pound the critical praise.]

In the United States, poetry has been for so long not so much bought and read as honoured and studied that the poet has grown accustomed to his marginal status. Unlike the novelist, he takes his exclusion from the market place as given, not a subject for anguish and protest but a standing joke, partly on him, partly on those who exclude him. Edmund Wilson was able to ask, as early as the 'thirties, ‘Is Verse a Dying Technique?’ and the mournful answer is implicit in the mournful cadence of the question. But Mr Wilson did not, of course, pose the question for the first time; behind his concern there is a tradition of discovering the end of verse which goes back as far as Thomas Love Peacock's ‘Four Ages of Poetry’ and the earliest impact of advanced technology on the imagination of the West.

Long before the poets of the United States had found an authentic voice, the survival of poetry itself had come to seem problematical; and certainly today there is no American poet who does not suspect that his own verse is likely to live (once his small circle of admiring friends has died) in the classroom and library, rather than in the hearts of men. Meanwhile, he is inclined to feel, he must somehow sustain himself on the long, difficult way toward academic immortality, and to do so he must choose between being subsidized by foundation grants and university sinecures, or earning his keep at some job completely unconnected with the making or reading of verse. Wallace Stevens was an actuary in, and then vice-president of, an insurance company; Robert Frost tried for a while to farm; William Carlos Williams was, all of his adult life, a family doctor; T. S. Eliot began his career as a bank clerk. Each choice is perhaps a metaphor for each poet's view of himself and his work: Stevens aspiring to the precision and objectivity of statistical analysis; Frost longing to root words in the soil; Williams thinking of himself as a healer and adviser to ordinary men in their daily suffering; Eliot viewing himself as the guardian of the treasury of culture. But all together, these choices surely reflect a common awareness of a common plight, the poet's inability to subsist on his poetry alone.

That plight, however, has sent more poets into the classroom than (with whatever metaphorical intent) into the great world of production for profit; even Robert Frost, for instance, ended up teaching, once he had discovered how little he could earn tilling the soil. It is not, I think, only the poet's aversion to a world of competition and economic risk which has led him more and more to seek refuge in the college, but a sense that there he is close to his own future, to the posterity for whom he writes. Certainly there he can, if he likes, tout himself and his friends, as well as abuse his rivals and detractors; and there he can set the captive youngsters before him the task of understanding and loving (or, at least, of seeming for a moment to understand and love) certain poems, including his own, more important to him than any of the goals—erotic, athletic, or technological—which those same youngsters pursue once out of sight. Sometimes he fears, in fact, that the only reading such poems will get in the world he inhabits is precisely this vicarious or symbolic one, between college walls and class bells.

All of the Southern agrarian poets from John Crowe Ransom to Randall Jarrell have ended up teaching at one university or another; and numerous other poets of quite different styles and persuasions from them and from each other (Delmore Schwartz and Robert Creeley, John Berryman and Richard Wilbur, for instance) teach regularly if they can, irregularly if they must, or, best of all, enjoy the status and pay of teachers with a minimum of classroom duties. Even among the maddest of our poets, there are not a few to whom the academy seems the only real place preferable to the Nowhere that otherwise attracts their total allegiance. Sometimes, indeed, it seems as if the path which leads back and forth between the classroom and the madhouse is the one which the modern American muse loves especially to tread.

Yet the poet is finally aware that in the university he is expected not so much to write poetry, or even to teach it, as to be a poet: to act out a role which is somehow necessary to the psychic well-being of society as poems are not. And, similarly, it is the assumption of his poetic persona for which he is paid by grants and subsidies, and applauded at symposia and writers' conferences. After a while, it may even seem to the poet that he is being paid not to write; but this is not really so, and it is only a kind of desperate self-flattery which leads him to indulge in the conceit. In point of fact, our society does not really care whether he writes or not, so long as he does not do it on the time they ask him to spend in embodying publicly what they have rejected in themselves: a contempt for belonging and order and decorum and profit and right reason and mere fact; a love for exile and irrelevance and outrage and loss and nonsense and lies.

It is not merely himself that the poet is asked to play; if it were, there would be no temptation involved worth resisting. It is rather a myth of himself, or, more properly, perhaps, a myth of the poet in general which he is called on to enact. And he has, as a matter of fact, a choice of roles, for the morality play in which he is urged to assume a part demands, like all literature on the level of mass culture, heroes as well as villains, good guys as well as bad guys. But how can a poet be a hero? How can the projection of what the great audience rejects function for that audience as ‘good’? To be sure, we can imagine best-selling poets on the analogy of best-selling novelists, unequivocal spokesman for the mass audience and its values; but there is so steep a contrast between ‘best-selling’ and ‘poet’, between what the great audience demands and what verse, any verse, does, that the concept is soon abandoned.

At any rate, since the time of Longfellow at least, the largest public in the United States has decided it does not need such hybrids in the realm of verse. The fictionist, the journalist, and, more recently, the script-writer for movies or television, performs much more satisfactorily any tasks which could be imagined for them. The servile sub-poet does not cease to exist entirely, but he is barred from the place where poetry is chiefly read, judged, and preserved, the academy, and relegated to the world of commerce, where he produces greeting card mottoes, or to ladies' clubs, where he flatters vanity, or to the mass magazines, where he provides filler for the spaces between editorials and short stories. In return for such meagre employment, he is asked to endure the indignity of being read, or listened to, without being noticed or remembered.

The ‘hero’ of the popular socio-drama we have been discussing is not so simple and obscure a mouthpiece; he is, in fact, both problematical and ambiguous: a hero-villain, a good rebel, an admirable non-conformist. And what makes him good or admirable is his presumed attitude toward the great audience which notices him without ever reading him; for that audience, by certain mysterious processes of cultural transmission, comes, after a while, to know—or believe it knows—who in the realm of art is really on its side, who regards it without something less than contempt. The one thing it will never forgive a writer is despising its reading ability, which, to be sure, it does not usually get around to practising. Such despite it regards as the ultimate treason, being willing, on the other hand, to forgive any challenge to its values or beliefs so long as that despite is not visibly present. As the critic at his best forgives a writer almost anything for writing well, the non-reader at his worst forgives him almost anything for writing ill—or simply for having the courtesy to seem to do so.

How can the great audience tell, after all, who is, in this sense a friend and who a foe? The point is, of course, that they cannot really tell at all, that they are likely to be fooled by the most elementary sorts of duplicity, since all their judgments are rendered on the basis of a handful of lines quoted for the benefit of their immediate mentors (schoolmarms and leaders of P. T. A. discussion groups) in the columns of, say, the Saturday Review, the New Yorker, the front page of the New York Times Book Review, or the back pages of Time. As a matter of fact, the reviewers for such journals exist precisely in order to serve as prosecuting attorneys for the great public in its continuing case against the artist; and what they must establish in order to prove guilt is that a given writer has produced passages which cannot be misconstrued or half understood without the reader's being painfully aware of his own failure.

It is not, then, mere difficulty which constitutes the prima facie evidence of a writer's contempt for the mass audience, but unaccustomed difficulty, a difficulty different from the kinds long so familiar in the classroom that no one any longer expects himself to do more than recognize and label them: Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, etc. Certain writers are, in fact, more flagrantly difficult than others, and sometimes they are deliberately so; but the public's consciousness of the writer's role in this regard does not always coincide with his own. As far as American serious poets are concerned, though all of them have known for generations that the onerous advantages of best-sellerdom are denied them, they have responded in two quite different ways: some of them writing as if for a very few, and some of them, nonetheless, writing as if for a popular audience.

What is, or at least, from any historical point of view, ought to be involved is rather a matter of stance than of genuine expectation; because in fact there is little correspondence between the poets' theoretical and actual audiences. Walt Whitman, for instance, theoretically popular poet that he was, had, at the time of publication and, I should guess, will have forever after, a much smaller readership than the theoretically anti-popular poet Edgar Allan Poe. Certainly school children, that largest audience of all, have never been urged to read Whitman as they have been urged to read Poe. Yet this has not kept certain later poets (irony breeding irony in the tangle of misunderstanding), dedicated to widening the audience of verse, from invoking Whitman as their model; while others, content to address an élite, have made their ideal Edgar Poe, at least as reinterpreted by the French symbolistes.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the great public needed neither Poe nor Whitman, having still at their disposal the respectable academic bard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and not yet having acquired that fear of Harvard professors which now plays so large a role in political as well as literary matters on the level of mass culture. Both Poe and Whitman were, therefore, found guilty in the treason trial for which only Poe had braced himself: Poe of drunkenness and drug-addiction and the celebration of death; Whitman of blasphemy and obscenity and the celebration of sex. Poe, at least, knew always that he was on trial, while Whitman, more naïvely and more typical of the American writer, thought of himself as wooing an audience, which in fact saw itself not as his beloved but as his judge.

Essential to an understanding of the difficulties of the American writer (especially, but not exclusively, the poet) is an awareness of this conflict of imagined roles, the clash of metaphors on the border between art and life. The relationship of the poet to the audience in the United States is—in his consciousness—erotic or sentimental; the relationship of the audience to the poet is—in its consciousness—juridical. While the writer may fancy himself pleading a tender suit, or carrying on a cynical seduction, the reader is likely to think of himself as hearing evidence, deciding whether to say, not ‘no’ or ‘yes’, but ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’: guilty of treason, or innocent by reason of insanity—or even, as in the case of Ezra Pound, both at once.

It is, of course, Pound who comes into our minds when we reflect on the trial of the poet. A century ago it might have been still Poe or Whitman, but neither of these long-dead (and therefore for us inevitably sanctified and forgotten) figures is capable now of stirring passion in the minds of sub-literates, who have no memory. Each age must have its own, brand-new defendants, and the mass audience sitting in judgment in the middle of the twentieth century has tried and sentenced the poet once more, yet as if for the first time, in the person of Ezra Pound. Indeed, they have condemned him with what, from their standpoint, is perfect justice. I do not mean merely that Pound was, indeed, guilty of the charges of abetting anti-Semitism (and more recently anti-Negro feelings), praising Fascism, and condemning the best along with the worst in his own country; the popular mind in America has often regarded with favour enemies of democracy, Jews, and Negroes. I mean that all of the ambitious long poems of our time have been written under Pound's guidance or inspired by his example: Eliot's The Waste Land, for instance, and Hart Crane's The Bridge, and William Carlos Williams' Paterson: all of those fragmented, allusion-laden, imagistic portraits of an atomized world which have so offended the Philistine mind. And I mean, too, that in his Pisan Cantos Pound, driven by his tribulations beyond the circle of his bad literary habits and his compulsive political idiocies, has caught the pathos and the comedy involved in the relationship between artist and society in the twentieth century with absolute precision. Both the self-pity of the artist and the complacent brutality of the community that needs and resents him have been dissolved in irony only to be re-created as improbable lyric beauty. These are offences hard to forgive for those convinced that they should judge and not be judged—certainly not by a mad poet.

Precisely the qualities, however, which have made Pound the prototypical enemy of the people in our time have attracted to him not only certain impotent young cranks who might have been successful Hitlers had time and circumstances conspired, but also the sort of disaffected young poet who turns out in the end to have written the poetry by which an age is remembered. Both kinds of Poundians wrote on the walls of bars and taverns ‘Ez for Pres’, both dreamed him as their ideal anti-President in the time of Eisenhower, while Pound in fact still sat in an insane asylum in Washington—to which he had been remanded, just after World War II, by a jury of his peers even more eager to find him nuts than to declare him a traitor. And what worthy living poet would such a jury not have found crazy enough to confine, whether or not he had made treasonable broadcasts for Mussolini?

The answer is easy: Robert Frost, through whose intervention Pound was finally released from the madhouse and allowed to return to the place from which he had once raged against his country. For Frost only could our whole nation have consented to parole Pound, just as for Frost only could it mourn officially and without reservations. Certainly it could not have mourned so for, say, T. S. Eliot, who, however sanctimonious in his old age, had once swapped citizenship; or for E. E. Cummings, who despised punctuation and the slogans of advertising; or for Wallace Stevens, who had obviously not even cared to be understood. Indeed, long before his death, the great audience had found Frost guiltless of the ultimate treason, the betrayal of what it defines as ‘sanity’, and considers itself to possess in an eminent degree. Had certain poems of his not become so standard a feature of grade school and high school anthologies (‘Mending Wall’, for instance, or ‘Stopping by Woods’) that one finally could respond to them no more than to yet another reproduction of the Mona Lisa? Were not other verses of his distributed every year as Christmas cards by his publishers, and were not still others quoted from station platforms and the backs of trains by candidates for political office?

Had he not even been invited by President Kennedy to read a poem of his own composing at the inaugural ceremonies, and had he not actually written one for the occasion, ending with the complacent boast that his appearance there itself inaugurated ‘A golden age of poetry and power / Of which this noonday's the beginning hour’? Fortunately, fate fought for him against the adulation of politicians and the crowd, that kindly comic fate which protects great men from their own delusions; he could not read the text, the sun too bright in his ageing eyes, and had to give up a television première in favour of more conventional modes of publication. But the damage had already been done; Frost had become in effect the first Poet Laureate of the United States, an honour and indignity no other American had ever endured. And the nation, which is to say, the mass audience, smiled at his discomfiture and applauded his honours.

But why did they feel so at ease in his presence? Was it merely that he had lived so long? There was enough in his career to dismay them, had they known or cared. He had begun as alienated from them as any poet they had ever cast in the role of utter villain; had fled to England already middle-aged and convinced apparently that he could make his American reputation only second-hand; had withdrawn from the pressures of getting and spending, as well as the obligations of citizenship, to sit alone in a back-country which its own inhabitants were deserting as fast as they could; had boasted all his life long of preferring loneliness to gregariousness, night to day, cold to warmth, melancholy to joy; had mocked in more than one poem the penny-saved-penny-earned philosophy of the American Philistine's laureate, Benjamin Franklin; had celebrated himself as a genius ‘too lofty and original to rage’, and hinted that his message was not for everyone but hidden away ‘under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it’.

In a long and, I suspect, not much read poem called ‘New Hampshire’, Frost has spoken, for once, without defensive pretence or disguise, as an artist—though he assumes the mask of a novelist rather than that of a maker of verses—and has identified without equivocation the bitterness that underlies his vocation as a poet.

I make a virtue of my suffering
From nearly everything that goes on round me.
In other words, I know where I am,
Being the creature of literature I am,
I shall not lack for pain to keep me awake.
Kit Marlowe taught me how to say my prayers:
‘Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it!’

He has spoken elsewhere quite as frankly of his audience, remarking, with the quiet and devastating irony that characterizes his best verse:

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Yet reading this epitaph upon the grave of their fondest pretensions, the great public, which does not recognize irony, could see only what short words Frost used and how he respected both the syntax and the iambic measure which they had learned in school to honour, if not use. If he was ‘lofty and original’, he did indeed keep it a secret, as he slyly declared, from the ‘wrong ones’, from the very ones who made up his mass following, who hated all other living poets, but loved him because he seemed to them a reproach to those others who made them feel inferior with their allusions to Provençal and Chinese poetry, their subverted syntax and fractured logic, their unreasonable war against the iambic, their preference for strange, Mediterranean lands and big cities. Even if they themselves inhabited such cities, the Frostians knew that it was not fitting to write poetry about them; one wrote, like Frost, not Eliot or Pound, about hills and trees, streams and animals. Was this not what the Romantic poets, whom certain wiseacre moderns liked to mock, had written about; and did they not now venerate the memory of those poets whom they had despised, perhaps, in school, but who at a distance benefited by the illusion of attractiveness which attaches itself to terrors far enough removed: home, mother, the bad weather of our childhood?

Pound and Frost: these become the ideal antagonists of contemporary culture for the popular mind, which knows such myths better than any poems. The award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Pound in 1949, while he was still a patient in St Elizabeth's Hospital, made it all a matter of public record. First the intellectual community itself was rent by disagreement about the wisdom of honouring the verse of one whose ideas they condemned (at the high point, an eminent poet challenged to a duel a well-known editor who, alas, never realized he was being challenged); and then the great audience, which has never noticed before or since any other winner of a poetry prize, found a voice in Robert Hillyer and through him joined the debate. In a series of articles for the Saturday Review, that second-rate poet vented his own frustration, as well as the public's rage, at the best poetry of the century, using Pound as his whipping-boy and Frost as his whip.

For this reason, then, we must come to terms with the legend of Pound and Frost, on our way toward a consideration of their verse. Indeed, not only the mass audience (to whom Pound is a curse-word in Hillyer's diatribe and a picture in Life, Frost an honorific in the same diatribe and a face on the television screen) but the poets themselves have been victimized by the myths mass culture has imposed on them. Under pressure, the poet tends to become his legend: Frost begins to believe he invented New England, and Pound to consider himself the discoverer of the Italian Riviera. And who is crude enough to remind the one that he was born in California, the other that he came from Hailey, Idaho? In the end, Frost almost succeeded in turning into the cracker-barrel philosopher from Vermont he played, spouting homely wisdom and affecting to despise the crackpot ideas of all intellectuals, while Pound came near to transforming himself into a caricature of the cosmopolitan aesthete, a polyglot unsure before the fact whether the word trembling on his lips would emerge as Greek or Catalan or pure Mandarin.

Worst of all, Frost finally permitted himself to be cast—in complete contempt of his deepest commitments, which are to alienation and terror—as the beaming prophet of the New Frontier, court-jester to the Kennedy administration, even as Pound was content to mug his way through the role of traitor-in-chief to a nation, though he seemed more a clown in the entourage of Mussolini. And for accepting such public roles at the cost of scanting the private tasks imposed on them by their talents, these two chief poets of our time must stand trial in quite another court, the court of criticism. Before the tribunal of critics, they will not be permitted to plead that they voted right (or wrong), or even that they were in their writings comprehensible (or obscure)—only that, keeping faith with their gifts, they wrote certain lines which no literate American, perhaps no educated man anywhere, will willingly forget.

Similarly, the charges against them will not be that they voted wrong (or right), or that they were obscure (or comprehensible)—only that, pursuing their own legendary images, they wrote dull or trivial, arch or pedantic, smug or self-pitying verse; that, moreover, by their poses, they have made even their best work unavailable to certain readers: passionate liberals and sensitive Jews in the case of Pound, the disaffected urban young and a vast number of Europeans of all persuasions in the case of Frost; and that, finally, by a strange sort of retrospective falsification, they have seemed to alter the meaning, the very music of the lines in which they have, in fact, transcended the limitations of their roles and of the weaknesses in themselves out of which the mass mind created those roles to begin with.

How much time will have to go by before we are able to read either one of them without these prejudices? If there were, indeed, a justice in the world higher than that of the critics, as the critics' is higher than that of the mass audience, both Pound and Frost would be condemned to spend that time in purgatory—a single chamber in a shared purgatory, where Frost would say over and over to Pound:

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

while Pound would shout back ceaselessly:

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst'ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
                                        How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
                                        Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
                                        I say pull down.