Pale Ten PERSPECTIVES LLNTRYN L Continued from Page Three croaches upon our feelings, and limits them or turns them aside. The center of our existence becomes the center of a smaller and smaller circle, and though the rhetoric of our feeling may be as grand as ever, what our words refer to is less and less. The forms we had first worked out for our expression we had really developed for other things, and they fit loosely now. If we grow con- scious of this, but still wrapt in some private disenchantment, away from the world, we at least can try the remedy of refining our metres and rhythms, using repetition to avoid the variety that would reveal" our emptiness, sub- stituting rhythm for sound because all sounds have become monotonous, re- turning to a strict couplet in the final chance that art may be an end in it- self. Not that disintegration will come about in easy sequence, in art any more than in life. For to make an art of the dispersal of one's strength betrays a kind of hope that strength will not be dispersed, and the potentialities for ordering artistic expression are not completely wasted until the poet has ceased - as Rimbaud did - to write. In poetry "the very effort to take over a form that was true to something once, to the West Saxons or to the eighteenth century - as Mr. Auden and others are doing now - is an implicit recognition that something is wrong and something is right. There are hopes of finding what is right, and hope has the charm- ing power of reviving sincerity. Which I take it is the reason ultimately that we are in no position to sit in judgment on a man's life, what we merely need to do is to prove our own sincerity. And in this, I think, lies the special virtue of Mr. Auden's lecture. His criti- cism was so sweeping, in undermining what we stand for, and so charitable, in that damning us he did not spare himself. In effect he was reminding us that we should prove through our acts that what he said was not true, that it is up to us to find a decent way of liv- ing for the individual in society. There is a kind of gallantry in so complete a challenge, so that we are able to hate without despising. And to see finally how at one moment the values a'man holds and the form of his poetry are related, we may turn to one of Mr. Auden's most recent poems, In Memory of Sigmund Freud. The stanzas in this poem reveal no other pattern than that which is broken up so that no repetition in beat or quan- tity will define the lines or stanzas as verse. There is a rhythm, as in good prose, but it is a rhythm whose only control is the comma and the period, and which has no reinforcement ex- cept that of syntax. And not merely is the metre contrived so that it is in- dependent of sound or beat repetition, but there is also the compulsion, I think, to permit no harmony of vowels or con- sonants to stand in the way of the prose meaning, no music to be an expression of the sense. Which is not to say that discord has been maintained, but only that the prose has been designed to prevent music: I think this is because Mr. Auden conceives the necessity of a kind of astringent thought, 'the strict and adult pen,' which is apparently thought divorced from belief. Such an aim, I think, would come as one loses the hope of communication, and relies upon the 'unobjectionable' thought, as if through the bareness which is left when one knows of no common faith in people, negation is the single means through which a context of belief and thought may be created eventually, and poetry restored. This a false hope, for when you tear away a man's beliefs, the residue is not thought, clear and strict, but fear. And thought is mean- ingless unless it is true to the whole existence. I have been trying to make distinc- tions about the necessary relation of a man's thought and feeling and te form of his work, trying not to simplify. And this is not so much for the sake of criticizing one poet. It is more im- portant that this poet is much imitated, and that he has achieved a special re- spect through his politics. Young revo- lutionary poets often admire and im- itate him before they find their own styles. If their devotion is literal in any artistic sense, they give to what is good in the technique they are assim- ilating their new strength, and they also give it to what is bad. One may con- ceive that such followers are capable of taking the good with the bad, turning what they find to their own purposes. If taste and judgment develop soundly, they will carry on or turn upon this be- ginning convention according to their several necessities. And while one may not always require of them articulate statements of their poetic beliefs, one may at least demand that they under- stand what they admire. If I have been right in describing some close con- nection between the subject and frm of poetry, it becomes especially 'neces- sary that those poets who have taken after Auden because he was a revolu- tionary symbol, and are now to various degrees disillusioned, must, in order to preserve their own promise, discover to what extent the technique of Auden's verse is adapted only to beliefs that are not endurable, and to what extent this form is useful for the affirmations they make in their own living. I think they might begin in renounc- ing one of the boasts implicit in Mr. Auden's lecture, a theory that has been current for a long time. It is that poets reflect the age in which they live, that through some special insight they un- derstand the world better than other people, and that, when it comes right down to it, they do our living for us. I think that other people are also alive and aware of the world; and when the poets learn that these others live as they do, quite as consciously ordering the principles of their existence, they will learn that it is not merely poets who live by what is true and beautiful and good (which are continually neces- sary words), or so at least I think when I remember something Stark Young once said, that goodness is the highest form of the imagination. In these terms the machine age has taken the life of action from no one, and people are still able to communicate with one an- other. SHY (Continued from Page Two) Not sure of what he would do eventu- ally, as in a dream Evan wrenched open the wooden door, looked anxiously in- side. For a second he saw nothing. Then there on the bed; his mother had pulled the covers up to her face. She was not moving. She seemed too frightened to move. Wondering - now, Evan glanced around to see what it was. Why the scream, the fright? And then he saw the burglar. THE BURGLAR. What was it that held him so fascin- ated. He kept watching the man who was glaring at him with wondering eyes. The burglar began to shift un- easily. True, he had a gun, but this tender looking kid was looking at him with an intensity that didn't seem nat- ural for a youngster. Why was the kid watching him. so hard. The burglar shifted again, made as if to move to- ward the dresser in search of loot, but stopped. The kid had a funny gleam in his eyes. The burglar was waiting. Evan looked at the burglar with a mind that was clear for him. Something about the burglar held him, and he wondered what it was. The burglar. was an odd looking person, as he scratched his hand through his hair. The hair was quite thick on his hand as the man in the zoo. The hair was thick all over like that man, and it was matted and grew even around his neck. The hairy man had said what a cute little tyke, and he had grabbed the scared five-year-old and had said, doesn't my little man want to look at the -apes, The great belly laughs he belched hurt-the.little boy even more, and the apes in the cages were making awful sounds. He was screaming and yelling and the ladies who had brought him didn't want to insult the man. Fin- ally, when the hairy man had let him down, he had fainted. Funny, after that time when the hairy man had scared him, he was always, shy. ed and left th the door slam. Evan went b closed the do He settled dov in th livin AND NOW the burglar was really up- anbook. After a book. After set. The boy had kept staring at him his chair. He and his hairy hands and neck. He won- dered why the boy didn't say anything. A curious gleam had come into Evvie's eyes. But the burglar, now quite rest- less, began to move toward the boy. He TU was new at this, he was getting frigh- tened. The boy didn't seem afraid. And he was so big, and the boy so small. Why (Contin doesn't he tremble? Look, his mother is trembling. Why isn't he afraid? _ Then, the burglar was afraid. It look- ed funny. Maybe somebody was fixing T was onl to trap him. Not going to take me. Not Neil told r me, nossir. Backing toward the window, ing those the burglar took a last look at the boy. story with g His expression now was one of Wonder. had happened He seemed 'to be smiling. He seemed fore that. self-satisfied. It was all very strange. "I guess I¢ The burglar couldn't figure it out . . . things someti Silently, he dropped through the wine he told me. " dow that had been open. His padding about the tim could be heard as he crept softly away. broke into tl Empty handed. Glad to get away. My brother Inside the room, Evan looked at his been with th mother who didn't say a word. He walk- days duringN ed slowly over to the window and peered home. "Hisa out. He didn't see anything. He closed said. "I can re the window, looked at his mother, turn- in a cellar wit e room. His mother heard . She sat in bed for awhile. ack to the front porch;. or, after coming back in. wn in the large easy chair room and started reading a while, he fell asleep in had been tired. RGLf4RY ued from Page One) y a few months ago that me what he had done dur- six days. He told me the reat clarity, although it d almost eleven years be- used to do pretty funny mes when I was a kid," I think I ought to tell you e I followed the man who he jewelry store." Neil told me that he had is man for the entire six which he was away from name was Stanley," Neil member well that he lived h his mother, and that he took care of the furnace. There was only one room in this cella, and in it were Stanley and his mother and the furnace. My brother told me that of all the men whom he had followed, Stanley was the only who had accepted him, and, more than that, the only one who had talked to him as he wanted. "I listened to what he said for six days," Neil said. "He told me that he had come from Wilmington two years ago -with his mother when his father had died. 'That Wilmington is a hell of a spot,' he told me. He told me also about robbing the jewelry store. 'I'd been thinking about that for a long time,' he said, 'but the funny part of it was that I didn't get anything. I didn't want to cut my hands any more, so I didn't reach. in through the glass.' I remember his telling me about wanting to live in the country," Neil said. "There's nothing at all living on a farm,' he told me, 'but the country, that's something else again.' Once we even went to Willow Grove Amusement Park for the afternoon," Neil said. "I had a good time out there." Knowing my brother as I do I know that all during this time he said noth- ing to Stanley, but merely listened to him. He listened also to the old woman. "Don't you believe what my boy Stan- ley tells you about robbing that jewelry store," she said to Neil. "I was very sorry wnen the police took Stanley away and I had to come home." "You might think that my doing something like that was pretty crazy," my brother said to me, "but I think that it is the reason that I understand people so well now." But I know that my brother no longer understands people even as he did then, because he can no longer go unasham- edly into their homes and listen to what they are saying. He is a grown man now, and has changed a great deal since that day when he followed the man with the bleeding hands down the street. SHORT STORIES A Burglary on Locust Street, by Dennis Flanagan .......Page one Shy, by Alvin Sarasohn................ ...........Page two Doyle Press, 1940, by Shirley Wallace ....................Page four Waiting, by Elizabeth Allen .......... ................Page five ESSAY Gallantry in Hell, By John Arthos ....................Page three 'POETRY by James Green, Nancy Mikelson, Gwenyth Lemon, Howard Moss, John Brinnin, Georgia E. Christlieb, Charles Miller, Agnes H. Stein.