SOURCE: Jackson, Laura (Riding). “Engaging in the Impossible.” Sulfur 10 (1984): 4-35.

My concern, in my writing on my experience (of close to sixty years) of the constitution and temper of the world of twentieth-century literary enterprise, is not to tell a life-story—to supply a professional autobiographical history as a subjective counterpart to biographical versions of my life-story. Such a subjective-objective categorization of viewpoints I regard as based on a fallacious conception of the nature of intellectual honesty. Two honesties are hypothesized in it, the second having attributed to it a purer character, as honesty, the first appraised as necessarily colored with the viewer's ideas of himself, or herself, limiting the account given of the subject of interest, or object of interest, or curiosity, to interpretation that excludes what others giving an account of it might report of it from an impersonal, unprejudiced judgement-vantage. I regard all that goes into the formation of an “objective” interpretation of material of event or fact as a generalizing of a variety of conjectured possible personal interpretations—an artificially construed consensus.

All telling about a person, whether by that person, or by others, is necessarily personal: it is what the “I” or “I” or “I” of each particular telling offers as true. The biographer “I” offers a telling, as a true telling, of the entire life-story of his subject, to the extent of his knowledge. There is always the problem, in judging a biography as truth, of evaluating, under the extent of its knowledge-basis, the degree of purity of the biographer's feelings towards his subject: is he all-free or not all-free in his disposition towards it of processes of telling determined by ideas of himself—where his feelings ought to be determined entirely by ideas of it in undivided emotional preoccupation with it? Biographical telling can go wrong in its trying to mingle truth about the subject of the telling with what the biographical narrator is moved to inject into it as truth about himself—and, as biographical narrators can be tempted to include in their tellings, an extended truth representing ideas of themselves of persons of a kind with whom they are pleased to feel identity in their biographer-disposition towards their subject. In autobiographical telling there can be injecting into the narrative reports of ideas of the autobiographical teller about himself that constitute for him a complete, a final truth to which he feels historical narrative will tend to do injustice. This stretched truth told by a person about himself can never be so untrue, I think, as biographers' truth in which the motive of justice to the subjects is compounded with a compulsion of justice-doing by the narrators to themselves—and to varieties of opinions of things presumed to match their own.

I am not plagued by anxious desires to get my life-story set down by myself as if before a death-time that might leave it at the mercy of objectivist arbitrary truth-formulations. I believe that the sense of my being what and who I am, and doing as I have done and do, will become perfectly clear, as I believe that the meaning of all being and doing must become, as we proceed in this human course of being and doing that is framed in our minds' framing of all that is in the language of an all-illuminating of reason of things we have hardly yet dared to speak.

However it goes as to the clarification of what there is to be, do, know, understand, and tell, I have something to tell about myself that has pertinence to the general human need of comprehending how much of what human beings set themselves to be and do next, and next, as in an ever-new immediate that extends all past being and doing towards possible fullnesses of being and doing, builds itself over and over into barriers against this fullness. What human beings have been and have done solidifies stone-like into protective walls that stop them in their trials of the possible to be and do, as at a safety-mark in knowledge and understanding: this is a line of necessity laid down for them by the urgencies of self-contentment. A necessity of self-contentment has steadily prevailed over the rule of the twin necessities of knowledge and understanding, in this late century's version of the continual human abrogation of the insistence of these ultimately undisregardable necessities which are at the center of the human mind's acceptance of its reality as the substance of human identity.

A climax of consciousness of an impotence laid upon human beings of fulfilling the expectations that human identity excites has gripped the sense of common identity that collects human beings into a loose summary of themselves as constituting “a world”; it is a climax of far-gone confusion in ideas of the nature of existence, and of human existence. A philosophy of failure of existence in the large pairs itself with a religion of success of human existence in the small—as kinds of being and doing, kinds of knowledge and understanding, pieces of a world of human consciousness of existence. Thus, human beings come to live their thinking life in pieces, amidst ruins of ever-outlived thought; and nothing has the clarity of full-minded occupation of the immediately existent, all is either ruin, or is undergoing weathering in the historical climate of ruin. It was with such a clarifying light that literature was supposed to touch the scenes of new thinking on what had been, was, and might be, a light of new truth cast in new telling.

Literature has played a double rôle in the drama of human hope of the human. It has served as the muse of the purest, the most purely human, of human ambitions, that of success in the objective that is the essential concern of the human mind: fullness of achievement of the possible in personal being and doing within the forms of knowledge and understanding natural to the mind. Among the varied fields of ambitious human activity, it was set apart, and set itself apart, as one in which human minds could devote themselves unreservedly to the expanding, towards the full of expressive witness-bearing to it, of the experience of knowledge and understanding of existence that is both the fact and the meaning of human existence. But literature has also had a rôle of beguiling the mind with inducements to letting time pass in operations of self-contenting deferment of full intellectual realization of the human experience of existence: it has served as a protector of experimentation in an intellectual do-nothing-ism that could not count as failing the supreme human ambition because it allowed theoretically for its fulfilment. The Classical and the Romantic actually merge into a meaningless equivalence in literature, and, with them, the practical and the theoretical in conception of the humanly possible—the theoretically possible kept at temporal remove by the operations of literary imagination, settling more and more ponderously on the literary horizon of human life as the image of a literarily revered impossible.

My own involvement in literature was an attempt to resolve the ambiguity of its two rôles in a conception of it as having, as a function of an intellectually, spiritually, and linguistically, integrated character, a potentially saving effect of clarifying to the human mind the fundamental motives of its thought-engagements and the embodiment of them in words. These memoirs are being written to depict the exaggerated replica of the ordinary world of demoralized human ambition that the world of literary understanding became in its progressive adapting itself to the moral temporizings of a humanity advancing in a wisdom of incertitude of the value of humanness, or of anything. For all the dwelling in them on my experiences as one who tried to cast her life-undertaking within the frame of literary undertaking, I do not make report of these experiences for their interest as a personal narration: the personal element in my report is incidental to consideration I mean to give, and to ask to be given, to the conditions of human purpose that make up the world of literary undertaking of our time. The sense of these conditions is such that they exclude involvement in literature where the name “literature” is construed as comprising interests and purposes of worded thought that are literally—practically, not theoretically—of humanly comprehensive importance, performances of the mind directed towards the fully possible in human possession of the power of truth.

What I tell is not a life-story in literary-world setting strung upon a theme of ugly treatment long and widely visited upon me, a narrative patchwork of complaints. I am no disappointed literary careerist! I offer here what is necessary for the eventual understanding of my life in its literary-world aspects of experience and activity as the life of one soul-bent, mind-intent, on pressing towards answer-point the question we are all confronted with by ourselves in our nature of beings existing as minds.

Where does possibility, that knowledge bounds, end, and impossibility begin? How much is it of the possible, to be knowingly? What is it, to be mind, determiner of the possible, the impossible, in being what, who, one is? In assuming literature to be the common ground of our asking and trying to answer this all-embracing question-and-answer devolvement upon us as truth of ourselves, the beings we personally are, and truth at once of being, which is inseparably all that is, I responded to my sense of the veridicality of the human mind. Literature: was it not meant to be the where of our telling what we are, who, and how much—and the whole story of the nature of the possible and the impossible? My report of how I came to know literature to be no common telling-ground but a process of continually gathering and continually dissolving resolves to try what can be told, the name excusing all the forms of cowardice and dalliance that it takes under its proud wing, should make it easier to find the place of common bravery for the telling of what is in being and in our being to tell.

2

I shall especially here present the part that the fact of poetry had for me in my adoption of literature as the ground of my trial of my powers of touching, in the reaches of mind that materialize it into words, the limit of the possible—the possible in letting one's being tell being's truth rather than appropriating language's uses of revelation for the truths of passing lives that selves living as mere self merely live. Poetry brought into view—into stark view—the debate of human consciousness with itself on what is possible and what impossible, in attainment to knowledge of the nature of our being—knowledge making the underlying, overlying, all-intervening fact of being familiarly (humanly, personally) understandable. The debate is inherently only an indeterminate of variant ideas on the possibility or impossibility of realization of particular ends of ultimate knowledge become subjects of speculative disagreement. Poetry introduced into the amorphous region of this debate—the region of human endeavor to encompass the unavoidable possibility-impossibility preoccupation and resolve it into a living story of progressive decision—a stand.

Poetry, as it were, civilized impossibility for the world of literary storifying of the human endeavor to attain to a decisiveness of being: to be livingly one with the truth of a knowledge of the nature of our being that was at once a knowledge of the nature of being in its comprehensive realness. The poetic component of literature is regarded as of a primitive ancestry in comparison with its prose components, in their character as of an intellectually planned, more deliberate kind of verbal composition. But poetry as having the identity of a component of literature has that identity necessarily as being and intellectually prompted and shaped kind of verbal composition. The features of poetry that connect it in historical accounting for it with primitive rituals of cantatory utterance, the physical devices of emphasis that survive in it, and devices for keeping utterance taut with image-evoking words for maintenance of emotionally concentrated attention, represent no more than a placation of suspicion of poetry as treating of matters, subjects, courses of thought and knowledge-experience, from a condition of mind exceeding the limits of the possibility for human beings of their fully understanding the nature of their being and of the realities of being implicated in it. The coming to be of poetry as part of the literary articulations of human consciousness, as a form of expression distinct from song and chant, expression which set apart certain areas of knowledge and understanding as impossible of access to human powers of mind and expression, marked the demysticization of those areas—what I have called the civilizing of impossibility.

The traces left in poetry of the early mysticalities of ritualistic simplifications of expression of the difficult, the over-difficult, in human knowledge-experience, constitute a compromise with a surviving primitive human disposition to fend off intercourse of mind with the impossible-seeming in knowledge and understanding: restriction of expression to a boundaried though far extended possible is cultivated as infallible protection against mistake-making excesses in ventures of knowledge and understanding. Poetry has used a double justification of itself in its endeavor to penetrate the areas of impossibility (areas regarded as exterior to the mind's reaches)—to demonstrate their penetrability. It presents the human mind in a condition in which it engages without trepidation in endeavors of knowledge and understanding extending beyond the margin of the readily expressible, the surely communicatable, in its experiences of apprehension. It establishes the unalienness to the mind, the unforbiddingness, of endeavor to think the difficult to think, encounter the difficult to encounter in mind, give expression to what is customarily regarded as belonging to mind-resisting kinds of knowledge and understanding even because the expression of it is not imaginable as other than difficult. But to its espousing of the difficult, in experience, for the mind, and the difficult expression of it, as not prohibitively difficult, poetry joined relics of those make-easy devices to which I have referred, by which, in pre-poetry, all difficulty was simplified out of the field of attention, the excluded difficult having assigned to it the nature of mystery—that which must reveal itself to be known, speak itself to be understood.

Poetry has the assigned part, and status, in literature's storifying of how human beings make their way through the intricacies of the possibility-impossibility debate, of a defender and prompter of their capability of overcoming, as beings of mind, the appearance of impossibilities in knowing and understanding that assail them as mere bodily constitutions isolated each in itself. But it confuses its representation of the difficult as potentially intelligible by tempering its intellectual enthusiasm to a presumed general human hesitancy to meet head-on, in mind-experience, what has not been familiarized into the automatically intelligible. Confusingly, much of what passes for the characteristically poetic consists of treatment of the generically “difficult” subject-content of poetic expression as linguistically reducible to simplicities of phrasing allying it to the subject-content of the mind's habitual, anticipation-fixed, range of experience. Judgement of what poetry “is” has been constantly attended, in its reception as a natural element of literature, and for poets themselves, by attitudes that qualify its essential nature (from which its existence as a distinct literary genre derives), as confident engagement in intellectual experience customarily presumed to be of faintest, even questionable, possibility, with conceptions of ultimately ineluctible difficulties for human intellectuality. Sympathy with, desire for, engagement itself in, poetry have all contributed to the fixing of the kind of experience peculiar to the poetic genre of the telling of the story of being at degrees of intellectual success allowing ever for an ultimate failure-range that maintains the supposition of a safe intellectual side for human consciousness, in the endeavor for all possible knowledge and understanding.

The compromise-element in the very sustenance of poetry as a crucially important truth-agency among the varied modes of storifying human life that are aggregated in literature has neutralized its potency, its credibility, as explicit evidence of the beyond-arm's-length, larger-than-brain's-breadth's, intellectual reach of our minds. The techniques of expression-style that distinguish poetic literature from prose literature were designed for the persuasive effect of presenting intellectual experience of an order commonly classified as outside the naturally experienceable, the normally possible, as, on the contrary, not at all formidable—as, indeed, agreeably conceivable experience. The flaw in the poetic promotion of the intellectually difficult as humanly necessary experience, of a primary importance for fullness of being, is not in excess of zeal. The conventions of artistries of persuasion that are ingrained ineradicably in the linguistic texture of poetry have their origin in a timidity towards the power that the conception of the Unknown, the Impossible-to-know, holds over minds, continuingly from primitive modes of thinking: in this conception, the mysterious was made to fill the greater part of the space of consciousness—beginning where safety of mind seemed in stopping thinking. The deference of poetry to the religious sensitivity of human beings to the possibility of the existence of areas of experience mystically closed to their minds has been a halter fixed by poetry upon itself by which it has guided itself through the ordeals of cultural suspicion as dedicated to follies of concern with the intellectually impossible.

Poetry's culturally anxious preoccupation with persuasive exhibition of the emotionally innocent (even naive) character of its intellectual concerns has crammed its engagement with the intellectually difficult, primitively identified with the humanly impossible, into the framework of an apologetics that recommends the poetic level of intellectual experience and expression as the happy human maximum while minimizing its actual consequences for human life as the life-state of beings of mind. The value of poetic intellectuality has ever been moderated, in poetry's cultural representation of itself, to enjoyable interludes of venture into the intellectually unordinary, not intended to be or capable of being disruptive of the literarily prevailing indeterminacy of attitude to the possible-impossible theme of debate of the human mind with itself. The peculiarity of poetry, of maintaining a cultural impartiality, a literary objectivity towards its intrinsic nature as an intellectually independent literary genre, though under literary supportive protection, has enfeebled the human mind's will to oppose the prohibitions of religious mysticality against endeavor of mind to attain to intellectual experience across lines marked as separating the possible from a forbidden soul-deathly impossible. The self-moderating cultural-literary posture of poetry has, in the first place, enfeebled its source-connection with the natural impulses of the human mind to take its powers of knowledge-experience and of thought-containment of understanding to an intellectual full corresponding to its autogenous, free-born sense of itself. Poetry can be said to have been continually declining in its dignity of function as the linguistic stronghold of human intellectual virtue and effectuality of being.

That poetry, as a component of literature, has, all along its functioning course, conspired against its dignity as the seat of the status of human beings with themselves as spiritual beings, this identity resident in the intellectual self-possession with which they confront the fact of being, can be verified in the queasiness of poets—a queasiness of steady accumulation—towards the attributing to them of preoccupation with themes, concerns, areas of experience denominatable as “intellectual,” in implied contradistinction to emotional response to experience as the culturally humane poetic predisposition. This falling in with a vulgar primitivistic prejudice against intellectuality as fraught with abnormal mental propensities has been reflected in a matching queasiness in the writers of poetic criticism, academic and journalistic. In both critic and poet ranks, religiosities of anti-rationalism, myth-infatuated subjectivism, have arisen to assault intellectual processes, and their operative mechanism, the coherencies of language, as representing a sort of demonology of overcivilized, false, truth-worship—worship of impossibility, the intellectual possibility of truth, which primitive discretion of mind interdicted as intellectual impossibility.

Much of the literary cold-shouldering to which my poetic work has been subjected—my poetic work with more scathing objection than can be found in criticism to which my other writing has been fated, in the treatment of its various parts as uninvited guests of literature—has been based on identification of it as essentially anti-poetic in being of an intensively “intellectual” temper. This identification has been given its full significance of qualities improper to poetry, as present in my poems, in the term “cerebral”—translating “intellectual” into the plain language of anti-intellectual bigotry. The word “mind” itself, becomes, simply, a word of this language of rather disreputably tenuous meaning. It has been suggested, for instance, that my poems have the peculiarity—not to be summarily despised—of representing a poetry of the mind. From just what quarter of the human being as an intelligence poetry should be conceived of as issuing, it would be impossible, in the dark-age intellectualism of modern-mindedness, for minds of that mindedness to speculate upon without propounding absurdities, which they could not recognize as such.

The trail of intellectual good-sense—the human mind's proper confidence in itself as mind—has been lost, along the way to modern time; it lost itself in poetry, the last refuge of intellectual self-respect among the distinct areas of thought-expression legitimized as culturally respectable in human societies. Intellectuality in the religious area, from being a walled-in precinct of esoteric religious apologetics, revised itself into a secularistic too religiose to have any secularly practical, too secularistic to have any spiritually practical, bearing on the general problem of human beings, how to live—to think and speak—as beings of mind. Philosophy, as a specialistic, professionalistic, engagement in intellectual activity—intellectual activity formalized into an esoteric privacy of mental activity hieratically marginal to ordinary, commonplace human thinking—functioned for long as constituting an area of intellectual freedom in which could be enjoyed an immunity from accountability for transgression of cultural (religious or political) ordinances demarcating where the safely possible in thought terminated and the impossible began. In its beginnings, philosophy was a loose composite of protopoetic and protoscientific intellectuality—the protoscientific and the protopoetic predispositions in uncertain balance. The scientific element of protophilosophic intellectuality had the advantage over the poetic element of possessing a utility-value of possible relevance to circumstances within the compass of physical experience. It persisted as an element of historically natured philosophy until a separately developing scientific intellectuality robbed it of its intellectual status as a component of philosophy by undermining the justification of philosophy's own existence.

Indeed, philosophy was gradually transformed as an area of privileged experimentation in intellectual activity, into a no-man's-land of effort to overcome intellectual difficulties the possibility of overcoming which was regarded as realizable only in imagined exploits of thought. Philosophy, that is, became a battle against the intellectually impossible already lost, in reality, by the nature of “things” (everything), but engageable in successfully in excursions into territories of intellection outlined on maps of the intellectually impossible conceived of as hypothetically less than impossible. Poetry also underwent a gradual loss of status and substance as a province of human concern with the capability of human beings of realizing the full of their nature as self-possessed intelligences—their nature as minds. Its identity as the region of dissipation of primitive mythologies of the Impossible in speakable thought-experience has lost so much of its cultural credit of intrinsic intellectual authenticity that the appearance, or evidence, of distinct intellectual activity in engagements in poetic activity has come to be critically characterized as the trademark of philosophical poetry. Thus, W. H. Auden, that dauntless poet-venturer into the sargassan accumulation of weedy modern intellectual idiom, dubbed me “the only living philosophical poet”—I seen by him as a uniquely skilled skimmer-off of stuff of philosophical verbality.

3

I have been explaining on what kind of historical ground I stepped in my seeing, in my early life, poetry as the only open pathway to my engaging in operations of intelligence answering to my—to my mind's—will to explore the possible in knowledge and understanding of all that is to know and understand. This “possible” was not conceived by me to be an extent of experience inevitably bounded by an ultimate “impossible.” I did not regard my mind—nothing and no one had induced me by direct or indirect influence to regard it—as other than an organ of thought having the functional potency of an autonomous consciousness. I never, as a child, or in my years of growth towards adulthood, had any responses to my individual experiences inhibiting me from taking them into my consciousness in free fullness. My responses were not creations of opinion or predilection, not repetitive in their character, as such responses are customarily; they were addressed undividedly to the immediate occasion of experience, not split between a prepared attitude and attention to what I found confronting me qualified by it. My mind was innocent of collusion with the thought-inclinations of others or partialities of my own to ways of thinking—engaging in experiences of mind—possessively favored with me as mine. Such detachment from particular associative customs of ideas-holding and attitudes-taking affects the mind's management of its language-procedures. I had no prompting, initially, in the forming of my speaking habits, from a family-pattern of fixed modes of expression and concentration upon set subjects of interest, or from any pattern of larger associative scope on which the domestic pattern impinged. Nor was there any appetite of nature in me for the protection of the customs of thought and habits of speech of special enclosures of association that little private worlds or separatistic public worlds provide from an outer world or a general world-at-large conceived to be the stranger-enemy of the comfort of being and feeling at home in how one thinks and speaks, sharing in the common comfort of all thinking and speaking in that particular manner.

It would take me much, much, longer to describe my approach to the necessity of disposing one's mind to the problem confronting us all, in our life-beginnings as intelligences, of deciding what to expect of one's mind—expect of oneself—in achievements of knowledge and understanding, if I used the devices of autobiographical narrative, telling, for instance, of the natures of my mother and father and older sister; and to what extent the common and individually differing concerns and attitudes of this little domestic population pressed themselves into my consciousness, and made my nature their habitat—or were resisted by my nature as intruders, thieves somewhat of its privacy with itself. And with what outer environments the little world of family personalities and circumstances had special affiliations, or into which I was propelled by mere inevitabilities of growth, that drew me into experiences that complicated the impressions formed in the private range of early experiences with suggestions of facts and rules of life producing conceptions of life's allowances that may have committed my desires and ambitions to prescribed expectations.

No sifting by myself or anyone else of the content of associations and experiences of my early years of life—the years that are in conventional autobiography or biography treated as character-moulding—would provide clues to the actuality that I, identifying myself and my mind as one and the same integer of being in my earliest phases of articulate consciousness, faced myself into a direct confronting of the constitutional entirety of being. In coming to know that I was I, I came to see that entirety manifesting itself, in incidental ubiquity in all the incidents of my experience. Whatever went into the making of me into a being whose mind and physical individuality proved to exist—as they did—bound in a fidelity of existing as of one nature, the makings made themselves into a madeness of me without the assistance or intrusion of factors of personal history, or a seizure by one making of dominancy in my nature giving me a one-track character, or a contention between two or more of them creating a constant problem of character-integration. What is denominated “character” with the sense of a self-government principle put by a person in charge of the makings that constitute his nature is, indeed, a superimposition upon the individual nature of a second self to it, the makings of which are acquisitions of sagacities pertinent to defensive meeting of experience-circumstances challenging the authenticity of the individual nature as something of determinate reality in itself. The consciousness that has ever been mine of the determinate reality of my individual nature has disburdened my experience of myself, as the active center of my experiencing of everything existing for personal experiencing, of anxieties of anticipation of threats from experience-circumstances to my given nature; my self first found myself to have a consciousness of myself not forced on me by any particular environment, but enjoyed as a condition of ease in the possession of it.

My first concerns of mind—with concern of mind a property of attention not only to closely present experience-occasions but also to all the experience-possibilities of the general environment of conscious and self-conscious individual being—were, as I am here trying to describe, of a quality not disparate from those that were mine insistently in my later times, in which the initial express manifestation of them took on the culturally categorical form of literary performance, genus poeticum. In the broadly literary and particularly poetic direction of choice in which my mind moved, the possibilities of thought, and therefore of mind-livable experience, were correspondent in realizability with the expressive possibilities of language. I wish to be understood, however, in all my pains-taking to identify my choice of poetry as a path of fulfilment of necessities of mind that were familiars of my consciousness from its earliest existence for me as the personal substantiality of my mind, as picturing a kind of self that I consider every human being ought be presumed to have, by the central implication of “human.”

I was from my earliest self-distinct being a thinking being: I trace this characterization back into a rememberable early-child selfhood of mind along a line of sense of myself as having presence, unbrokenly, in the successive times and places of which my life-history is built, with a certain fullness of thought-immediacy as the body of the presence perfectly coincident with its physical immediacy in the particular place in time, time in place. This I believe to be not a personally unique story of a life-long consistency of self-identification as one's self. It is only the kind of living as a self-possessing self that corresponds with the kind of being human beings have by how they are made. Their makings incorporate, by the evidence of language, which projects itself from the unity their makings achieve as a consummating expression of the unity of being with itself in the possibilities of being it generates, the quality of self-identity that is the intrinsic reality of being-unindividual, undivided being.

It can be seen, from how I have described my disposition to the life of general experience as a life for which thought-engagement in the possibilities of knowledge and understanding of the Existent, in its distinctive forms and its prevailing essentiality as Being indivisible, has been its personal activity-center, what I judge to be the humanly natural—to be to the point of existing in the form of and by the functional principle of human identity. My sense of the humanly natural, moreover, my instinct of this in my own direction-giving to my life, took me to the poetry-precinct of literature as the where, in the continuity of the endeavor of human beings to live a life of speaking intelligence of the nature of being, in which there was least reversion to primitive avoidance of pressing the possibilities of knowledge and understanding to a point spelling impossibility for the sustaining of consciousness of human identity. Poetry is a speaking-place, in the world of human life as life of mind, in which, uniquely among the places in it for long set aside for effort to discover what can be said, told, to the fortifying of belief in the reality of human life, the only limitations put upon what may be attempted there are those of verbal propriety of a certain kind. The limitations upon the extent and kind of literary engagement that have shaped the character of other types of literature did not enter into the conventions of poetry; it came closer to matching the need of human beings, in their consciousness of themselves as beings of mind, for a manner of open verbal representation of themselves as such than any other literary type of expression, and any of the forms of speaking convenience that have constituted the spasmodical rhetoric of what is called “ordinary” speaking. Poetry has saved as a signal of hope to the natural human desire for language's equalness to the engagement of the mind in thought-experience, with express realization of it, to reaches of enlarged life of mind still mistrusted in the shadowy corners of innumerable human minds as fearsome places of death of mind.

I have been stressing the human naturalness of my instinctive disposition to human experience as mind-centered, and of my adoption of poetry as a way of engagement in what is suspected of being, in human frailties of death-fear, impossibility. Poetry has allowed of the testing of language's capability of supporting the mind in its effort of attaining to complete embracing of the knowable and understandable, in fulfilment of its nature as a living form of the self-intelligence of being, indivisible being, “reality,” the one-natured all-that-is. The putting of language to this test is historically native to poetry; and anyone who treats poetry as the natural course of the mind's natural endeavor to function as a whole mind, its thought-experience the story-substance of a whole speaking, a truth-rapt telling, goes by the visible credit of the name, as one goes by a street-name on a sign-post, turning into its line of progress as necessarily leading to the site of one's probing interest. As to the anticipation of possibilities of language's yielding fullnesses of speaking, telling, meaning-potency in the breathed or inscribed words: the anticipation is natural, there is implicit in the provisions of language, beyond the spare facility that the commonplace in word-use makes of them, a range of expressive potentiality that does not touch its limit in the professional literary styles that are called, in the aggregate, “prose.” Poetry represented the consciousness of possibilities of heightening the expressive powers of language beyond the degrees of literary facility in word-use that may be called “commonplace” in relation to what has been attempted in poetic word-use.

It must be granted to the poetic vision of an expanded verbal expressiveness, suited to the mind's state in expansions of thought-experience beyond the norms of ordinary thinking and speaking activity and outside the bounds of general literary intellectual practice, that it did not of itself foster solemnities of lofty philosophic abstraction in the use of words, or aesthetical refinement of the physical features of words, for effects of extraordinariness in subject and manner of poetic statement—cardinal components of the practice of poetry. Poetic vision of the possibilities of the reaches of the mind in knowledge and understanding, and the reaches of the expressive power of words used in a harmony of truth-intention with the mind's thought-intention, was not, in the genesis of poetry and its taking form in human life as a manifestation of recognition of it as essentially a life of the mind, compromised by commitments to a literary definition of the nature of poetry. Conceptually—which is to say, in its intellectual foundations (which is to say, in the character of spiritual vocation animating it)—the function of poetry remained, in its career as a literary institution, indefinite; and it is in the very uncertainty of the objectives of poetry and its proper limiting procedural conventions, according to literary definition of the proprieties of intellectual and linguistic possibility, that is, in the very literary indefinability of poetry, that the relative intellectual and linguistic purity of poetry has inhered. Alas, this purity could not be a source of the development in poetry of a definition of its own of the intellectually and linguistically realizable, according to poetic vision, because it began itself in the freedom of indefinite conception, and then bartered its freedom for a status of relativeness to literature as supportive of it, in its want of an inherent definite principle of self-justification of its own.

At its purest, in its impurity, poetry has adhered more perfunctorily than zealously to the limitations of verbal propriety taken over by it as a placating religiosity from the primitive formalism of utterance disciplining the attraction of the intellectually forbidden in word and thought. It has endeavored to maintain a maximum of freedom from mythopoetic pieties of verbal style and cast of thematic thought, and from prescriptions of its raison d'etre not only by the canons of good literature but by those of all the non-literary standards of good intellectual and linguistic performance, and of that jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, canonical order of values called “art.” But the unvarying and invariable existence of poetry in its historical life as part of the general functional course of literature, because of its lacking an internally definite functional identity, has imprisoned it within the general attachment of literature to historical circumstance as its spiritual setting. While the literary possible has never transcended the circumstantially qualified intellectually and linguistically possible, poetry's ideal spiritual over-reaching into the historically impossible has never precipitated itself outside the temporal fields of literary perspective into actual immediacies of the implicit ultimate possible, the ever-immanent potential, in intellectual and linguistic realizations of the humanly possible.

4

I have presented the history of poetry as I have learned it to be, in my learning what poetry was not, from my giving myself to in and taking it unto myself as the emblem and the reality of human hope of redeeming language from subjugation to the exigencies of temporal convenience and subservience to the laws of short-lived literary eternity—the redeeming of language to its unity of nature with the intellectual soul that human beings have in their having mind. Without sense of this history, there could be no awareness of the double rôle that poetry has had in human intellectual life (intellectual life as the spiritual entirety of human life of the mind)—the one a literarily defined category of the endeavors of consciousness to encompass the possible in linguistically authenticated knowledge and understanding of the authenticities of being, the other a free range of her personally natural in the endeavors of consciousness as not limited by the literary confining of possibilities of realizing them to the range of the historically reasonable in expectation of the possible in the mind's utmost and language's utmost in matching expressive power. Without an awareness of the double nature of poetry's intellectual identity there could be no attaining by any poet to a comprehension of the doomedness of poetry to insoluble self-contradictoriness, in its putting of its ideal objective under the protection of the logic of literary objectification. None of the few poets who have left off in being poets with implication of dissatisfaction with poetry itself has gone to the core of the reason of the discovered unsatisfactoriness. The core of the matter is in the poet's initial motivation in the adoption of poetry as a main form of mind-engagement.

The difference between myself and those others is that my adoption of poetry as a form of mind-engagement crucial for my envisagement of my life's possible, as of one reach with the possible implicit in the human concentration of the attributes of being, was that my vistas of expectation, in the adoption of it, were not sealed within literarily drawn horizons of the explicit possible in thought-experience of reality, of the one reality, in the living terms of the reality of being a human being. It took me a little life's-work length of dedication to poetry as the way of engagement in the total possible to learn of the inevitability of arrestation, to some degree in thought and at a proportionate impotence in the wording of it, that had been visited upon not only poets but the human all of those moved to live their being with fidelity to their nature as beings of mind, and to mind's tongue as their own. Our thinking and speaking course had been shrouded in spells of presumption of a doomed fatedness to encountering interminably some degree of unbreachable impossibility—spells cast upon human self-belief by the nervous doctrine of a loosely combined religious, philosophical, literary, and culturally generalized intellectual rulership.

The while I pressed my way as poet with confidence in the poetic potential as having an ideal identity with the human personal potential in a not categorically limited possible in articulately realized thought-experience, poetic practice was undergoing, in the peculiarly heightened consciousness of the general engagement in literature of the time, a challenge from the time to justify itself in terms of twentieth-century preoccupation with intellectual up-to-dateness. A spasmodical crisis of anxiety coursed through those years, aggressive effort to manifest intellectual up-to-dateness and perfectly satisfy, nevertheless, the literary canon of discrimination as to what is and is not “poetry.” Although I was, from my beginnings as a poet, modern-minded, in awareness of the intellectual date of human life, and my own personal date as a being of mind, I neither early nor late sought in how I wrote poetically to exhibit title to intellectual modernity, or, on the other hand, to press for entitlement of my poems to treatment as conforming to one or another of the forms of poetic performance, whether experimentalist or traditionalist in their leanings, that were allowed literary respectability by twentieth-century dispensers of critical favor.

I kept my orientation as a poet uncomplicated by concern with questions of how I fitted into contemporary critical mappings of literary contemporaneity, where my poetic work belonged, in the modern scene of poetry-production. I took my bearings from my sense of the existence of a natural relationship between the objective implicit in poetry, of vision of the possibility of fullness of expression of thought-experience at mind's full, free, thought-range, and my personal consciousness of mind's need of such fullness, for the immediate fullness of being of the person whose identity as a person is as a being of mind. In my temporal placement of myself in my engagement in poetry, I was conscious of modernity in the total human context of concern with the yet unachieved envisaged as immediately achievable, rather than in a special context of concern with literary-period modernity.

The modernity of self-conscious period-timing is necessarily a graduated modernity—a historical modernity, it can be called. In recent times I became aware that there had developed, in the ideological chronology of British-born literary-criticism of the last several decades, a sophistication of disdain of the term “modernist” as identifying a tendency in the poetic activity of the first two decades of this century towards new modes of poetic verbal style and compositional form. The adoption of a haughty antipathetic attitude to the term as an offending vulgarization of the special character of the address of poets in the twentieth-century to the problems of poetry took rather long to develop. It was a delayed reaction to the implications of the book that I wrote with Robert Graves as my collaborator, published in 1927, of the title A Survey of Modernist Poetry. The term “modernist” was an appropriate characterization of the stir of consciousness, in poets of the first quarter of the century, of a new time-setting, and of the effort this induced to assure a marked difference in the poetic literature that bred itself in it from that of the preceding century. The term had no other function than the identification of this development. It was a useful term for the spot-lighting of the development in its effective existence as a self-unifying agglomeration of loosely kindred trends. And the book proved a useful critical report on the make-up of the temper of the twentieth-century's pioneer version of “modern poetry.”

That book was not a doctrinaire bible of poetic modernisticism, a propaganda endeavor to win favor en masse for what it denominated “modernist poetry.” The animating attitude of the book to the material as a whole with which it dealt was an interest in the restiveness permeating it all, what it betokened as sensitivity to a call from the new time-setting for something new in the conception of the poetically possible. For myself, as one keenly conscious of there being question in the new time of the very fate of poetry, a main concern was with what the shift in poets' sense of themselves to a new time-location might betoken as an awakening to the need—the call from the anticipation implicit in poetry—for reaches of thought-experience and language-versedness unfettered by the accumulated self-pridings of poets of the past in variations or improvements upon, or ingenuities of imitation of, prior or coetaneous exhibition of the poetic possible. The inspiring ideal implicit in the existence of poetry had become submerged in the century-on-century self-reduplicating flood of the practice of it. For me, the question as to the upsurging, in the new century, of preoccupation with renovations in poetic practice was: What, how much, in the effort for the new in poetic performance, emanated from profundities of consciousness, in poets of the new century, of the estrangement that had settled into the sense of themselves, as poets, and into that of the poets who constituted their literary ancestry, and into the materia poetica that constituted the historical reality, “poetry,” from the motive of fullness of utterance of mind's apprehensions at full, with which poetry was ingenerately informed? How much in the effort for the new poetic performance was mere self-assertiveness of poets as citizens of a new time, feeling themselves at liberty to produce a new brand of poetic literature?

My own perception, as a poet, of the fulfillment enfolded in the vision prompted by poetry of the completely possible, in the knowing, understanding, speaking, life of the human being as being of mind, made me conscious of how much was wanting from what should be, by the congruity of this vision with the essential nature of human being, my sense of which had directed my energies of hope into engagement in the possibilities that poetry presented to hope. In the assessing of the “new,” in the inaugural phases of twentieth-century poetry, there had to be considerable allowance made for the potential presence, in the midst of all the self-assertive proclivities to mere innovation, of instincts roused to work for a revitalizing of the motive inhering in the existence of poetry, which had diminished to a static principle defensively justifying its existence as a literary necessity.

The underlying and variously sustained theme of The Survey of Modernist Poetry was the crisis-condition into which poetry had come of being on the brink of a loss of conscience of the fundamentals of linguistic principle and conscience of the fundamentals of intellectual principle—the partnering principles of the rational integrity of poetry. If the excitations of poetic impulse in the new time-setting had strong relation to an alarmed will in poets to perpetuate poetry against dissolution of its character as the proponent of the practical, verbally express potency of mind as the spiritual reader of the meanings of being, and beings—if the will towards poetry of these poets acting as agents of a new poetic dispensation had the quality of a determination upon a renewal of poetry's vitiated fidelity to its foundation faith in reason as a spiritual function of the mind—the new impetus in poetic activity represented morally bonafide concern with poetry as embodying the literarily idealized possibility of verification of the reality of the human degree of being in its sense-making of itself as all-articulate mind.

The Survey of Modernist Poetry left unexplored the field of likelihood stretching ahead from the latter part of the century's second decade of poetic activity. The poetic work of the period dealt with in the book was evaluated in relation to a very liberal discrimination of the difference between a newly enlarged conception of the responsibilities and proprieties of poetic intent and shallow, time-proud motivation-impulse. There was indulgence of innovation, but mere dallyings in individualistic peculiarities of poetic diction and form were not awarded prizes of praise for “modernism”; no hospitality was dispensed to what was irrelevant to the resolution of the problem of what might be realized, within the scope and patterns of the poetic vision of the possible in lovingly worded thought, of the intellectually uninhibited, humanly unlimited possible in the speaking of the live meaning-content of being. The book rested at offering a record of the contemporary poetic provision as a basis of expectation of what might follow or not follow, in the century's further course, indicative of the fate of poetry as incorporating an ideal of the good as manifestable in words, and the fate of the human order of being in terms of the significance, in its regard, of the fate of poetry.

Nothing issued from what followed, in the programmatically new literary consciousness of the century's times, related to any determinate development in the crucial moral intertwining of the fate of poetry and the fate of human existence as an inwardly self-intelligent and outwardly real (expressly participant in the total reality—inward and outward—of the existent) order of being. I myself went on, until the late years of the following decade, probing the poetic potential as the way to the determinate fating of itself, of the human order of being, to the defining of the nature of being and of the good according to the truth-intentioned spirit, and rationality of structure, of language. Language increasingly took on for me, as I went further in poetry, its intrinsic force as the natural ascendancy of a law of the humanly possible over the primitive divinity of a law of the humanly impossible.

5

The coverage of The Survey of Modernist Poetry was loosely divided between American and British poets, seen as calling for attention under the auspices of the classification “Modernist.” I shall justify the book's treating exclusively of these, besides by my and my collaborator's individual and common interest in and experience of poetic activity within the English language's bounds of poetic practice, by my own special sense of a marked difference between the American and British new-century self-consciousness of poets and that of the poets of other national identity. The difference between American and British poetic (and generally literary, and artistic) affectedness with new-time impulsions of self-liberation from old-time dispositions of mind, postures of feeling, modes of practice, maintained the two sets of new poetic behavior within a single frame, still, of a culturally humane conception of the literarily, poetically, linguistically, permissible. In American poetic activity in the vein of twentieth-century new-timed sensibility, exploration of “new” possibilities in forms of self-assertive preoccupation and expression enlarged upon an already developed general literary propensity in British poetic activity, a reserve of self-protective prudence kept the modernism of individualistic liberties-taking at a low-intensity degree of freedom for self-examining curiosity. In both, the urgencies of innovation enacted themselves within the intellectually respectable field of the new psychological versions of common sense. American poets were daring in their difference from one another. British poets were ingenious in creating a new poetic atmosphere from chosen elements of the early twentieth-century intellectual air and chosen elements of the intellectual spirit of poetic past-times seeming in sympathetic correspondence.

All that was produced, in American and British poetic locales, of the self-conscious time-spirit that was termed “modernist,” in the book to which I have been referring, has left little besides ineloquent reverberations of twentieth-century literary history, much of it kept alive in the laboratories of critical academics, particular quantities of it randomly resuscitated for the uses of sentimental allusion of a literate sort. Early twentieth-century ventures in poetic modernism in other national locales—and in generally literary and artistic modernism—were of a go-for-bust recklessness, making war on the culturally humane while offering no alternative to it of a mind-fulfilling possible in works of express sensibility of consciousness of the nature of human being as partaking of the self-intelligence of the general nature of being.

The snobbish prudery of disapproval with which the vaguely grouped circles of British literary criticism of the century's later decades that regarded themselves as its best looked back upon the identification “modernist” (the innocently correct identification made in the Survey of Modernist Poetry of the new-time sense of themselves with which many poets of the early decades were animated) was undoubtedly a manifestation of an awareness of the flattening out in the progress of the British twentieth-century continuum of the upsurgings of new-time self-consciousness that had whetted the ambitions of writers of the earlier periods. “Modern” was made, in later twentieth-century special British self-consciousness with respect to poetry, the authorized critical designation of a stabilized poetry, “modernism” outgrown. An air of purposeful normalness in poetic phrasings, rhythmical and metrical castings, and subject-matter and allusion variety-range, and a doughty democraticness of admixing of what was literarily denominated “everyday speech” with traditionally poetic forms of diction, became the mood-at-large of the poetry by later century British literary ascription termed “modern,” with implication of freedom from temporal, period, eccentricity. The actual character of it all is that of endless, unbroken, human and intellectual monotony, all variation, trial of difference, extension of reach of thought and word, held within an arc of possibility strained with narrow tentativeness above the flats of literary instincts of historical self-preservation. Exceptions to this general British poetry-provision are of a somewhat go-for-bust, now out-of-date, daring, an overwrought vigorousness; they fall into place, in this poetry, as examples of the virile, in the make-up of the British literary temperament, to be proud of.

I am following these trails of differentiation in the behavior that the poetries of various twentieth-century cultural quarters have displayed, in responding to the provocation of a new-time consciousness, because the general result of the early rising and working of the consciousness has been a final dissipation of the influence-force of poetry on the human faculties of intellectual hope. The inspiration as which poetry served, through the literary ages, to faith in possibilities of comprehensive intelligence, fulfilled in immediacies of speaking corroboration of its rectitude in the exercise of it, proved finally ineffectual against the influence-forces, in their modern assemblage, of age-on-age of culturally civilized intellectual bargaining (with instinctive purpose to placate still primitively feared Impossibility) for an intellectually advanced but culturally (quasi-spiritually) undangerous Possible. Poetry could never have served as more, in the course of human beings' probing of what it means to be beings of mind, than a reminding vision of the human state as such a state of being, in the midst of the confusion of images of the human being that have been invented for the uses of power or advantage, or the relatively innocuous uses of vanity. I turned from poetry as I knew it in its live identity: a forecasting promise of the nullification of Impossibility, and realization of Possibility as Completeness—but bound to the never-never of historical futurity. There was a threshold to cross. I crossed it.

My commitment to poetry was not to poetry according to the literary representation of its identity in the terms of new-time self-consciousness, of historical up-to-dateness, but to poetry as the mind's conception of its intellectual adequacy ever-present to it in envisagements of the possible in full-worded realizations of the essential thought-nature of being. Therefore, the characterizations “modernist” and “modern” had neither terminological fascination nor critical suspectness with me. I was not worried about my or anyone else's literary-period identification or credentials. But concern with their place in time, with their literary immediacy, has been the worry-center of the intellectual preoccupations of twentieth-century poets', and, generally, those engaged in some form of cultural productiveness have been troubled with similar anxieties about the relevance of their engagements to their time. The anxiety-about-contemporaneity of English—as distinguished from American-literary orientation manifested itself, in conformity with the tendency of irritable adoption of postures of composure responsive to challenges to definitive position-taking peculiar to the native moral temperament, in what poets and critics of the post-early twentieth-century British literary locales have been terming with increasing complacency “The Movement.” If one endeavors to identify the special character of the poetry of the “Movement,” in its development and its persistence in the century's further course as a stabilizer of British poetic policy, one finds oneself faced by a canon of endless self-perpetuating intellectual eclecticism as the key to the practical possibilities for poetry in modern times.

“Modern,” for British literary and general twentieth-century self-consciousness in the later parts of the century, came to signify a vague indeterminateness allowing of variations from a norm itself of undefined variability, but presumed to be the implicit rule of intellectual kindness for those sensibly free of leanings of prejudice. Of course, this intellectual mood, this moderness of sanguine literary seniority to earlier century historical self-consciousness in the area of general literary and particular poetic sensibility, does comprise leanings of prejudice. But the over-all loose signification attached to “modern” is expected to smooth out, in time, all disparities of leaning. A conception of “modern” poetry as an infinite succession of incidents of poems-production keeping alive the name of poetry replaces all earlier notions of new-century poetic newnesses: this process of automatic continuity imparts a ready-made up-to-dateness to all the poetry-displaying incidents.

In comparison with the British twentieth-century course of things poetic, the American has been confusingly ununiform. One can hardly, indeed, speak of an American twentieth-century course of things poetic. The self-assertive insistencies in the American sector of early twentieth-century poetic modernism led into a widespread particularism of poetries of self-assertive force and pattern, intellectually, literarily, disconnected from one another: there was no blending into a common quality of self-assertive national concern for the national state of things poetic, and its repute at least with itself.

The experimental venture of certain members of the Fugitive group of poets, after its disbanding, in the propagation of a doctrine of Southern agrarian culture, had its roots, I believe, in a search for solider ground for their individual poetries than the mere identification of being Southern poets. After the subsiding of the episode, the participants concentrated their energies on their individual poetries to their respective capability of self-assertive disconnection. A later flare-up among them of programmatic connectedness under the “New Criticism” banner had its origin in the appeal to a surviving provincial intellectual vanity of the discoursing of British Empson on poetic ambiguity. The new interest resulted from Empson's seizing upon an important mode of textual examination of poems followed in the Survey of Modernist Poetry, a serious process of linguistic scrutiny of my providing, and perverting it into a trivially authoritarian rhetoric of critical analysis. My collaborator's later claim of having been the inventor of the book's poems-reading method has not won him lasting credits, as has so much of my thought and its works taken by him into possession—there is a trend of recognition of my being unmistakably the source of the method.

This post-Fugitive project of collective ambition was before long engulfed in the general national particularistic complexity of literary modernism, both the poetry and the criticism content of which was a medley of isolatedly individual productions.

6

But what of myself, in relation to the account I have given of the self-conscious compulsion in American and British poet and critic activity to manifest twentieth-century intellectual contemporaneity? As a poet in the simple sense of one engaged in doing my expressive utmost to present in poems the suprapersonal essence of personal experiences, and as one, besides, engaged, as I increasingly became engaged, in the testing of the poetic possible as the full of the realizable in the human speaking possible, I did not make of my engagements a venture in construction of an individual literary authorial pile, or, on the other hand, assimilate myself in my work to the producers of some collective entity of literary architecture. My posing for myself a standard of the adequate in human speaking—and, therefore, in human thinking—that was not derived from the historical content of poetry, but that I thought capable of being met with, through, poetry (with, through, what else, if not poetry?), had the effect of detaching me automatically, even in the initial phase of my poet-and-writer life, from both the sprawlingly busy looseness of American poetic and generally literary production and from the loose compactness of its United Kingdom counterpart (British literary individualism tends not to go beyond a cautious partition into sub-groupings within the collective entity constituted of the separate British island-like literary world).

My position in the general English-language literary consortium was not, has never been, one of self-cultivated detachment. I have had a position of detachment thrust upon me in both the American and the British areas of literary conceiving of the suitable in English-language literary modernity by a difference, in my initial stance as a poet, from the stances of American and British twentieth-century poets. This difference made me an eccentric in respect to what was, actually, an erraticism in their conception of the nature of poetry and, generally, literature, that became for them, and generally for the body of writers subscribing to identification of themselves as of twentieth-century mentality and emotionality, the poetic and literary status quo—the proper acceptance of existence in modern human times seen as calling for a peculiar order of attitudes to existence, and to human existence, itself.

The order of attitudes that became the century's mental stamp did not spring into being within the poetic-literary domain of activity, thought, conception. It issued into general cultural circulation from a wide-spreading break-down in the human intellectual imagination produced by the ascendancy of scientific report on the nature of things. The very idea of the universe was shattered by the enlargement of science into a story that little by little should factually cover the case of the manifold everything. The idea of all things as being, together as one not-just “thing” but a spiritual entirety, a reality of living significance within which we had existence as its articulate own, witnesses living the witnessed—the conception of a totality of difficult but perhaps not impossible knowability, that had been the motive force of mind behind the special prognosticative intuitions of poetry and the general imaginative tendency of literature—disappeared from twentieth-century intellectual life. It disappeared with the completeness with which a long-established scene of varied composition, of nature's or human-beings' making, or both, can be stripped of all evocative features of remembrance in a sudden sweep of devastation.

I had, in my writer-beginnings as a poet, and continued to have in all my thinking and writing activity, what came to be, in the light of twentieth-century literary intellectual evaluation, the peculiarity of functioning with consciousness of presence in a universe. This intellectual position of mine, a position naturally mine, personally, and mine as a writer not disrespectful of the attitude-norms of an intellectual status quo that was the basis of literature's historic identity and continuity of identity, became, under the auspices of the revised intellectual status quo embracing everything to which literary identity was attributable, an irregularity for which neither American nor British twentieth-century literary-criticism characterization had a definition. And this inability to characterize my conception of my personal and writer location, because of the comprehensiveness of what I include in the writer-function—seeing it as the exercise of the language-function at its farthest reach of transcending the conventional cultural and linguistic limits of the possible-to-say—has persisted into the century's ninth decade as the basis of the general from period-to-period literary reaction to my work.

The first responses to my poetic work, from editors of the American magazines to which I in its earliest years submitted it, can be described as a pleased recognition of a something in subject-matter and verbal mode capable of simple identification as “originality”: the identification subsumed what would in the later course of contact with my poetic work, and in the hardening of twentieth-century general, and especially literary, intellectuality, be given a character of intellectual unplaceability and literary irregularity. In those earliest years of my being a poet, I was welcomed into membership in the group of American poets of the name “The Fugitives”—was regarded by them as an important “discovery.” My poetic writing was judged by them to be of a lively inspiration, to have a quality of intellectual vigor, and a spontaneous linguistic fitness, combining stylistic flexibility and control in its patterns of diction. No effort was made by them as a group to read me as, or make me, one of their kind. The association faded, within a few years, into a piece of literary history, with some remnant of significance in the context of literary intellectual history as an encounter between myself as a poet falling outside the identification-categories that served the American form of modern liteary sensibility and The Fugitives as a band of poets seeking the distinction of an identity of aristocratic group-separateness from the newly modern national run of things poetic that would incorporate in it a certain temper, a special dignity, that could still claim to be a proper national character. I can be regarded, in this encounter, as sharing with The Fugitives a problem of literary placement with utter difference, in the actual nature of the problem, between them and myself.

I had no want to place in my self-identification, and in my assumption of the functional identity of poet (extending into the linguistically comprehensive identity of writer). I was in the patent universe, having a human presence in it, a consciously exposed presence to it, living in it in the active state of engaging in what had long been generally literature's, and very especially poetry's, mission to demonstrate to be less than impossible. The specifically poetic, the generalized literary, objective was for me simple to the point of involving a one and only problem for the poet—for any who felt themselves versed in the spiritual potentialities of language. The problem was: did one—or did one not—envisage a fearless, free, putting into utterance all that has being, is in being, to the full of the opening of one's own being to the knowledge that words wait in mind to take into their hold?

I knew the place I had, for my functioning literarily, in the terms of my acceptance of the total given place of being. Until our century, this total place, the universal being-site, even as it gradually dimmed into the shadowy socio-politico contours of a world, was at least figuratively the environment of poetic utterance, and intellectual landscape of literary activity in the large. But “world” as the all-place became too worldly a site for direct literary location within it, the interests inhabiting it too varied for literary interests to hold their traditionally peculiar universe-savoring own in it. By the time the twentieth century had taken on historical growth, literary location had split off into world-like placements mapped outside the contracted world of modern, scientifically de-universalized human consciousness, in sentimental recognition of the spiritual foundations of literature: but literary location was actually sequestered within the compass of this world by a decline in spiritual vigor of dedication become general in activity of the perennially revered identity “literary.”

The placement-problem of The Fugitives was the common one of the new literary age: What to do? and Where to go? for the doing of it. The attitude of The Fugitives to the problem was different from that which was becoming the prevalent, the standardized, attitude to it of American literary practice: the individual writer sought a place in a literary world made up of places consisting of individual entities of literature-orientated endeavor—the modernized American literary scheme of things became systematically, where it had previously been spontaneously, pragmatical. The Fugitives longed for something more intellectually decorous, “better,” as British literary worldliness of the new age seemed superior by its social quality of national coherence. None of the Fugitives individually, or the group as representing a composite of individual yearnings, solved the problem of finding a formal literary world-frame within which to settle happily upon What to do as writers. John Crowe Ransom came the closest to this kind of writer-composure by adhering to an original disposition to philosophical non-committalism: in all his allying of himself with others in causes of formalizing literary-activity placement, creating patterns of literary-world intellectual decorum, he maintained a private reserve of quizzicality, a self-scrutinizing humor that stripped him to an identity with himself as one who wanted in personal reality to be nothing other than a reasonable man. He was the most typically “American” member of the group, in his desire to “be himself” in what he did literarily—the desire qualified by a humane-minded rejection of the spiritually provincial American reliance on the energies of self-assertion as the surest means of realizing the ends that come first with one. But all the members of the group—myself a newcomer whose contacts with it were not such as to knit myself with the others into family-like connection—strove for writer-identity and placement under the cloud of a problem of literary-world location. I knew no such predicament of choice and decision.

The ratio of possible-impossible was for me not a ratio in terms of a somehow acceptable compromise between existing literary-worldly opportunities for poetic, and general, writer-activity and what I conceived myself fit for and capable of doing as a poet, a person claiming “writing” as a natural personal function and life-occupation. My poetic writing, and my evident personal stance in it, attracted The Fugitives, I judge, by its evident freedom from consideration of worldly and literary-worldly pressures to do a this-or-that, or find residence in an acceptable here-or-there. They equated their elaborate privately devised honor-system with my unhesitating, unpremeditating, immersion of myself—I accepting myself as endowed with a ready writerhood identity and natural-world (universal-setting) location—in the chances of kinship discoverable between my engagement in the impossible that honorable speaking being cannot allow to be impossible and the engagement of others in solemnities of speaking (in writing) as true believers in an ultimate all-sayable. I began my writerhood in the open of my sense of myself as functioning under all the tests there might be of the reaches of the possible in the determinations of words. They began in the shelter of a literary-family world of their own, as protected in it from the inducements to identity and location-finding in the great open spaces of the American early twentieth-century literary world that might compromise their standards of what they wanted to do, and what place to be in, in the doing of it.

The Fugitives were trying to set up conditions for the kind of literary world in which they wished to function; and they were, in this, dreaming wistfully of a kind of social structure of things literarily typified by British literary-world law-like custom. This was a rule of automatic consent by all involved to as much liberty of individualism in literary activity as did not interfere with an over-all uniformity, designed to accommodate itself to the partner-principle of individualism designed to accomodate itself to it. They did not succeed, any, in placing themselves comfortably in the American literary world—eventually, each went cowled, in his taking his place in the American literary stretches, with the idea of a suitable literary world as something that lent a distinction of special literary purity to their American-writer status. The element of control in the mechanism of British literary-world functioning I have described has had an attraction for others besides The Fugitives. It was this, I think likely, that drew Eliot into the British sphere of writer-functioning: it afforded security from the uncontrolled, free-ranging individualism of American writer-functioning, and kept special influences, such as those of French literary modernism, from taking too serious a hold. Pound himself felt the attraction of traditional organizedness of literary practice in old-world countries—besides that of the developing go-for-bust propensities of old-world literary modernism. (One might think of him as trying to lay down the principles of a coherent, well-organized literary modernism by Americanizing old-world literary niceties and preciosities into a style of disciplined self-assertiveness.)

I myself did not run away from the haphazard American literary succession and varying sum of things. But there was no basis for my having a sense of necessary attachment to the American version of a literary world. The relationship with The Fugitives apart, which itself proved to be upon no distinct common ground of writerhood principle, there lacked, for my absorption in the American version of a literary world, and my accommodating myself to absorption in it, the ingredient in my writer make-up of the kind of intensity of preoccupation with being-a-writer characteristic of typically American writerhood. This is an intensity of preoccupation in the writer with making his writing performances an imprint of himself upon the environing literary scene that he has accepted (according to the fixed professional wont of writers generally in modern literary times) as an entire world-frame of activity, comprising the outer limits, intellectual, moral, spiritual, of all the significance his writing could evoke. No other national literary society is marked by this intensity of writer-preoccupation with self-imprinting as the logical objective of writer-concentration on writing.

7

No other type of association in-the-large of human beings exists that is distinctly resemblant of the American in its having as its basis the principle that to be a human being is something of prime importance. The principle has but a faint emotional reality as the axiom of national identity—the territorial actuality, America, must be imaginatively visualized, ever, for concrete emblem of nation-actuality. And, as the principle has been cast in political, philosophical and religious terms, there is present in them only vaguest suggestion of a peculiarly American conception of the wise, the right, the good, in human association. There can be said to be an American idea of life. But nothing more definite can be said about the idea than that all the sense in it is focused on the single, generally self-evident fact that to be a human being is something of prime importance. The American idea of life is conscious of a fact converted into a principle. That the idea is not corrupted with ideas of in what this importance consists borrowed from past notions of it need not be regarded as a miraculous escape from the inevitabilities of imperfection considered implicit in human character, human thought. The American idea of life has the purity of untroubledness about what the prime importance may be that inheres in the fact of being a human being—which has the unfortunate effect of stupefying those possessed of it into a persuasion that all the problems of the heretofore and the elsewhere of human life lie off-shore to the American dispensation of understanding.

The general American inclination in thinking on what there exists for the human mind to know and understand has been to stop just where the sense of there being something of prime importance in being human draws a line of time across the path of what seems an endless indeterminate sameness of the state of being human. The characteristic intensity of American-mindedness, the urgent immediacy, peculiar to American thinking, of consciousness of the fact of being human as having implications seeming of an almost unthinkably extensive scope, had had issue only in a self-confidence in the fact that does not try itself out in projection into the possibilities it is assumed to embrace. The intensity of the consciousness uses itself over and over as a barrier against desperation. The social cheer of American life is, thus, a continual back-turning on an ever-deferred broaching of the yet unexplored part of the fact and the experience of being human, a collective privacy that does not break down either into privately or publicly enjoyed illuminations of the yet unidentified importance and significance of being human.

The general course of American life illustrates in amplitude, I believe, my descriptions of the effect of this keeping at halt, in strenuosities of diversified exertion, the intuitions of an importance belonging to the fact of being human of universal reference. That I use the term “universal” to indicate my sense of the actual reach of these intuitions, I feel a right to do by my likeness, in my sense of my energies of human being, to that common to those born and upreared in an environment to a large extent free, in comparison with other national environments, of governing presumptions of the nature of the human state of being. But there is also, in my use of the term, a reliance on the difference I know, in my mind's will from the historically developed will of generalized American-mindedness, towards the projection of the energies of human-being into areas of knowledge and understanding prehistorically and historically denied to human possibility. This difference has contributed to there being an even more marked disregard of my poetic and other writing, in the American literary environment, than that of the deliberate inattention to which it has been subjected in other literary environments.

The difference between the prevailing trends of mindedness in twentieth-century literary performance and the intellectual disposition of my writing, in its whole character, is centered in my mind's will's being given over to a purpose to imprint upon human actuality the fact of a universal actuality opened to elucidation in the language of human actuality by the responsive presence of the human actuality in the universal. This is a will operating in a scene of purpose absolutely removed from the scene of purpose of the self-imprinting operations (the imprinting of human actuality upon human actuality) that became the American type of twentieth-century versions of the literarily possible, and from the scene of every other type of twentieth-century engagement in the possible. From the account of the nature of this difference there should not be omitted reference to the bearing of my identity as a woman upon my functioning in my identity as a human being. How the factor of access to the alleged impossible for the human mind figures in my will of mind, and my thought-experience generally, has crucial connection with my sensibility as a woman of the presence of the human actuality in the universal actuality. The minds of men develop such sensibility as women instinctively possess by the overcoming of instincts of defensive proprietorship-sense of their human actuality; the records of human thinking are heavily marked with emphasis and counter-emphasis in relation to this conflict between masculine instinct and sensibility transcending it, the forms of thought produced by the conflict descending from age to age as the generally natural in the ways of the human mind.

Sensibility of universal actuality as of intimate meaning for human actuality is not of an order to require an overcoming of instinct; it belongs generically to the human instinct of the interpresence of human actuality and universal actuality. I have always steered away from raising question of the effect of the fact of my woman identity in the critical antagonism visited upon my work, and from feministic militancy in approach to questions of sexual differentiation in matters of literary pertinance calling for intellectual evaluation wanting critical principle, not feminine suspicion, for my instrument of judgement. But here I adduce for noting, among considerations as to why my mind's will as exemplified in my thought's courses, has moved, and moves, as it has, and does (my work widely viewed as disparate from all twentieth-century literary norms), the connaturalness of my engagement in endeavors to discover the full extent of my mind's possible in thought-experience possibility and my mind's being the mind of me, in my identity as a woman. My uninhibited acceptance of my woman's sensibility of the presence of the human actuality in the universal confers uninhibited appreciation of the truth-potential of the language of human actuality.