The Siren And The Seashell Part 3

Reyes's poem, which was written in 1923, not only antic.i.p.ates many contemporary preoccupations but also contains-in code, in a condensed language that partakes of the hardness of stone and the bitterness of the sea, skillful and savage at one and the same time-all the later evolution of his spirit. All of Reyes-the best, the freest, the least trammeled-is in this work. There are even a secret wink, a malicious aside for the delectation of the knowing, and anachronisms and a pointing of the intelligence toward other lands and other times. There is erudition, but there are also grace, imagination, and a painful lucidity. Iphigenia, her knife, and her G.o.ddess, an immense stone fashioned by blood, allude simultaneously to pre-Columbian cults and "the eternal feminine"; the sonnet in Orestes's monologue is a double homage to Gngora and to the Spanish theater of the seventeenth century; the shadow of Segismundo sometimes obscures Iphigenia's face; at other times, the virgin speaks enigmas like the "Herodiade" [Herodias] of Mallarme or gropes with her thoughts like "La jeune parque" [The young Fate]; Euripides and Goethe, the Catholic concept of free will, the rhythmic experiments of Modernism, even Mexican themes (universalism and nationalism) and the family quarrel, all are brought together here with admirable naturalness. There is nothing too much because there is nothing lacking. True, he never again wrote a poem so solid and so aerial in its architecture, so rich in meanings, but the best pages of his prose are an impa.s.sioned meditation on the mystery of Iphigenia, the virgin liberty.

The enigma of liberty is also that of woman. Artemis is pure and cruel divinity: she is moon and water, the G.o.ddess of the third millennium before Christ, the tamer, the huntress, and the fatal enchantress. Iphigenia is just barely a human manifestation of that pallid and terrible deity, who runs through the nocturnal woods followed by a bloodthirsty pack of hounds. Artemis is a pillar, the primordial tree, archetype of the column as the grove is mythical model of the temple. That pillar is the center of the world: The stars dance about you.

Alas for the world if you weaken, G.o.ddess!

Artemis is virgin and impenetrable: "Who glimpsed the hermetic mouth of your two vertical legs?" Eye of stone, mouth of stone-but "the roots of her fingers suck up the red cubes of the sacrifice at each moon." She is cliff, pillar, statue, still water, but she is also the mad rush of the wind through the trees. Artemis alternately seeks and refuses incarnation, the meeting with the other, the adversary and complement of her being. The carnal embrace is mortal combat.

Eroticism-in the modern meaning of the term-is always veiled in Reyes's work. Irony moderates the shout; sensuality sweetens the mouth's terrible grimace; tenderness transforms the claw into a caress. Love is a battle, not a slaughter. Reyes does not deny the omnipotence of desire but-without closing his eyes to the contradictory nature of pleasure-he seeks a new equilibrium. In I figenia cruel and other writings desire wears the armor of death, but in his more numerous and more personal works his cordial temperament-melancholy, tenderness, saudade ("nostalgia")-calms the blood and its hornets. Reyes's epicureanism is neither an aesthetics nor a morality: it is a vital defense, a manly remedy. A pact: no surrender, but also no war without quarter. In one of his youthful poems, much more complex than it seems at a first reading, he says that in his imagination he identifies the flower (which is a magic flower: the sleeping poppy) with woman and confesses his fear: I tremble, let the day not dawn in which you turn into a woman!

The flower, like woman, hides a menace. Both provoke dreams, delirium, and madness. Both bewitch-which is to say, paralyze-the spirit. To free oneself from the virgin Iphigenia's knife and the menace of the flower, there is no known exorcism except love, sacrifice-which is, always, a transfiguration. In Reyes's work the sacrifice is not consummated and love is an oscillation between solitude and companionship. Woman ("bound up in the hour-free, although she gives herself, and alien") is ours for only an instant in reality. And, in the memory, forever, like nostalgia: Thank you, Ro, thank you, Solitude and companionship, Smooth water for all anguish, Harbor in every storm.

Pact, agreement, equilibrium: these words appear frequently in Reyes's work and define one of the central directions of his thought. Some critics, not content with accusing him of Byzantinism (there are criticisms that, on certain lips, are really eulogies), have reproached him for his moderation. A spirit of moderation? I refuse to believe it, at least in the simple way in which simplistic minds want to see it. A spirit in search of equilibrium, an aspiration toward measure, and also a grand universal appet.i.te, a desire to embrace everything, the most remote disciplines as well as the most distant epochs. Not to repress contradictions but to integrate them in broader affirmations; to order particulars of knowledge into general-but always provisional-schemes. Curiosity and prudence: every day we discover that there is still something we need to know, and, if it is true that everything has been thought, it is also true that nothing has been thought. No one has the last word. It is easy to see the uses and risks of this att.i.tude. On the one hand, it irritates people with categorical minds who have the truth clenched in their fists. On the other, an excess of knowledge sometimes makes us timid and weakens our confidence in our spontaneous impulses. Reyes was not paralyzed by erudition because he defended himself with an invincible weapon: humor. To laugh at one's self, to laugh at one's own knowledge, is a way of growing lighter.

Gngora says: "The sea is not deaf: erudition is deceptive." Reyes was not always free from the deceptions of that sort of erudition that causes us to see yesterday's madness in today's novelties. Besides, his temperament led him to flee from extremes. This explains, perhaps, his reserve when considering those civilizations and spirits that express what could be called sublime exaggeration. (I am thinking of the Orient and of pre-Columbian America but also of Novalis and Rimbaud.) I will always lament his coldness toward the great adventure of contemporary art and poetry. German Romanticism, Dostoevsky, modern poetry (in its more daring forms), Kafka, Lawrence, Joyce, and some others were territories that he traversed with an explorer's valor but without amorous pa.s.sion. And even in this I am afraid of being unjust, because how can one forget his fondness for Mallarme, one of the very poets who most clearly embodies the modern artist's thirst for the absolute? He was blamed for the mildness of his public life, and some said that on occasion his character was not of the same stature as his talent and the circ.u.mstances around him. It is true that sometimes he kept still; it is also true that he never screeched as did many of his contemporaries. If he never suffered persecution, he also never persecuted anyone. He was not a party man; he was not fascinated by force or numbers; he did not believe in leaders; he never published noisy statements of support; he would not renounce his past, his thoughts, or his work; he did not confess nor employ autocriticism; he was not "converted." His indecisions, even his weaknesses-because he had them-were changed into strengths and nourished his freedom. This tolerant and affable man lived and died a heterodoxist, outside all churches and parties.

Reyes's work is disconcerting not only in its quant.i.ty but also in the variety of the matters it deals with. Yet it is the farthest thing from being a scattering. Everything tends toward a synthesis, including that part of his literary work made up of his annotations and summaries of other people's books. In an epoch of discord and uniformity-two faces of the same coin-Reyes postulates a will for harmony, that is, for an order that does not exclude the singularity of the parts. His interest in political and social Utopias and his continuous meditation on the duties of the Spanish American "intelligence" have the same origin as his fondness for h.e.l.lenistic studies, the philosophy of history, and comparative literature. He seeks in everything the individual trait, the personal variation; and he always succeeds in placing this singularity in a vaster harmony. But harmony, agreement, and equilibrium are words that do not define him clearly. "Concord," a spiritual word, fits him better. He is more worthy of it. Concord is not concession, pact, or compromise, but a dynamic game of opposites, concordance of the being and the other, reconciliation between movement and repose, coincidence of pa.s.sion and form. The surge of life, the coming and going of the blood, the hand that opens and closes: to give and to receive and to give again. Concord, a central, vital word. Not brain, not belly, not s.e.x, not caveman's jaw: heart.

Death is the only irrefutable proposition, the only undeniable reality. At the same time, perhaps because of the excess of reality it manifests, because of the brutality with which it tells us that presence is absence, death gives an air of unreality to everything we see, not excluding the very corpse whose wake we are attending. Everything is and is not. Our ultimate reality is nothing but a definitive unreality. It could be said, modifying slightly a line by Borges: "Death, scrupulous of unreality." Reyes is here and is not here. I see him and I do not see him. As in his poem, The rider of the air pa.s.ses by, mounted on his fresh mare, and does not pa.s.s by: he is in the shadows clinking his spurs.

Reyes still gallops. His arms-the hand and the intelligence, the sun and the heart-gleam in the darkness.

L.K.

II.

Robert Frost

E. E. c.u.mmings

Saint-John Perse

Antonio Machado

Jorge Guillen

Visit to a Poet

[VERMONT, 1945].

After walking along the road for twenty minutes in the three-o'clock sun, I finally came to the bend. I turned right and began to climb the slope. At intervals the trees bordering the path afforded a little coolness. There was water running among gra.s.ses in a brook. The sand creaked under my shoes. The sun was everywhere. The air smelled of hot, thirsty green weeds. Not a leaf stirred on the trees. Above them, a few clouds rested heavily, anch.o.r.ed in a windless blue gulf. A bird sang. I halted: "It would be much better to lie down under the elm. The sound of water is worth more than all the words of poets." And I walked on for another ten minutes. When I reached the farm, several blond children were playing around a birch tree. I asked them about the owner, and without stopping their game they pointed toward the top of the hill and said, "He's up there in the cabin." I started walking again. I climbed through tall weeds that came up to my knees. When I reached the top I could see out over all of the small valley: the blue mountains, the brook, the luminous green fields and the woods beyond them. The wind began to blow, and everything swayed, almost joyously. I approached the cabin. It was an old, unpainted little wooden house that had turned gray with age. There were no curtains at the windows, so I shoved through the weeds and peered in. The old man was inside sitting in an easy chair. A woolly dog rested beside him. When he saw me, he stood up and gestured that I should go around. I took a turn and found him waiting for me at the door of the cabin. The dog jumped up and down to welcome me. We went through an entry-way and into a small room: unpolished wooden floor, two chairs, a blue easy chair, another reddish one, a desk with a few books, a small table with papers and letters. Three or four pictures on the walls, none of them remarkable. We sat down.

"It's hot, eh? Would you like to have a beer?"

"Yes, I think I would. I have been walking for half an hour and I feel tired."

We drank the beer slowly. With his open white shirt-is there anything cleaner than a clean white shirt?-his innocent and ironical blue eyes, his philosopher's head and farmer's hands, he appeared an ancient sage, one of those who prefer to see the world from their place of retirement. But there was nothing ascetic about his appearance, only a virile sobriety. There he was in his cabin, retired from the world, not in order to renounce it but to contemplate it better. He was not a hermit and his hilltop was not a rock in the desert. The bread he ate had not been brought to him by the three ravens, he had bought it himself at the village store.

"This is a really beautiful spot. It almost seems unreal. The landscape is very different from ours, it is more suited to the eyes of man. And the distances, too, they are better made for our legs."

"My daughter has told me the landscapes in your country are very dramatic."

"Nature is hostile down there. Besides, we are few and weak. The landscape swallows men up, and there is always the danger of being changed into a cactus."

"I've been told the people are still for hours on end, without doing anything at all."

"In the late afternoon you can see them sitting motionless along the edge of the road or at the entrance to the village."

"Is that how they do their thinking?"

"It is a country that will turn to stone some day. The trees and plants are tending toward stone, the same as the people. And the animals, too, the dogs and coyotes and snakes. There are birds made of baked clay and it is very strange to see them fly and hear them sing, because you have not got used to the idea that they are actually birds."

"I'm going to tell you something. When I was fifteen years old I wrote a poem, my first poem. And do you know what the theme was? The Noche Triste. I'd been reading Prescott around then and perhaps my reading made me think of your country. Have you read Prescott?"

"It was one of my grandfather's favorite books, so I read it when I was a child. I would like to read it again."

"I like to reread books too. I'm suspicious of people who don't reread. And of people who read a lot of books. This modern mania seems crazy to me; it only increases the number of pedants. It's better to read a few books well and read them many times."

"A friend of mine tells me they have invented a method for increasing one's reading speed. I believe they are thinking of using it in the schools."

"They're crazy. What they ought to teach people is how to read slowly. And not to move around so much. Do you know why they invent all these things? Out of fear. People are afraid to pause over things, because that compromises them. That's why they run away from the land and go to the cities. They're afraid of being alone."

"Yes, the world is full of fear."

"And the ones in power take advantage of that fear. The individual has never been so despised and authority so revered."

"Of course, it is easier not to live for oneself, not to decide for oneself. It is even easier to die if you die on someone else's account. We are overwhelmed by fear. There is the fear of the common man, who surrenders to the strong. But there is also the fear of those in power, who don't dare to be alone. They grasp for power out of fear."

"Up here, people leave the land to go to work in factories. And when they come back they don't like the countryside any more. The countryside is difficult. You have to be alert all the time and you're responsible for everything, not just for a part the way you are in a factory."

"Also, the countryside is an experience in solitude. You can't go to the movies, you can't take refuge in a bar."

"Exactly. It's an experience in freedom. It's like poetry. Life is like poetry, when a poet writes a poem. It starts out by being an invitation to the unknown: he writes the first line and doesn't know what comes next. We don't know what's waiting for us in the next line, whether it's poetry or failure. And the poet has that sense of mortal danger in all his adventures."

"There is a decision waiting for us in every line, and we can't get around it by shutting our eyes and letting instinct work by itself. Poetic instinct consists in an alert tension."

"The chance of failure is hiding in every line, every phrase. So is the danger that the whole poem will fail, not just a single line. And that's how life is: we can lose it at any moment. Each moment is a mortal risk. And each instant is a choice."

"You are right. Poetry is an experience in freedom. The poet takes chances, he gambles the whole poem in every line he writes."

"And you can't take it back. Each act, each line, is irrevocable and forever. You're compromised forever in every line. But now people have become irresponsible. No one wants to decide for himself. Like those poets who imitate their predecessors."

"You do not believe in tradition?"

"Yes, but each poet is born to express something of his own. And his first obligation is to deny his ancestors, the rhetoric of earlier poets. When I began writing I found out that the words of the ancients wouldn't serve me. I had to create my own language by myself. And that language, which surprised and bothered some people, was the language of my own people, the language I heard all around me in my childhood and adolescence. I had to wait a long time to find my own words. You have to use everyday language . . ."

"But putting it under a different pressure. As if each word had been created just to express that particular moment. Because there is a certain fatefulness in words. A French writer says that 'images are not sought, they are encountered.' I don't believe he means that chance determines one's writing but that a fated choice brings us to certain words."

"The poet creates his own language. And then he should struggle against that rhetoric. He should never surrender to his own style."

"There are no poetic styles. When a style is reached, literature takes the place of poetry."

"That was the situation in American poetry when I started writing. That's where all my difficulties began, and all my lucky hits. And now maybe it's necessary to struggle against the rhetoric we've created. The world turns around, my friend, and what was up yesterday is down today. You have to scoff a little at all this. You can't take anything too seriously, even ideas. Or, to put it better, it's exactly because we're so serious and pa.s.sionate that we ought to laugh at ourselves. I don't trust people who don't know how to laugh."

And he laughed with the laugh of a man who has seen it rain, and who has also got wet. We stood up and went outside for a walk. His dog leaped about ahead of us as we went down the slope. After we were outside he said, "Above all, I don't trust people who don't know how to laugh at themselves. Solemn poets, humorless professors, prophets who only know how to howl and harangue. Those kinds of men are dangerous."

"Do you read the moderns?"

"I always read poetry. I like to read what the young poets are writing. And also a few philosophers. But I can't stand novels. I don't think I've ever read a one."

We went on walking. When we reached the farmhouse, the children surrounded us. The poet talked to me now about his childhood, about the years in San Francisco and the return to New England.

"This is my land and I think it's where the nation's roots are. Everything sprang from here. Did you know that the state of Vermont refused to take part in the war against Mexico? Yes, everything sprang from here. The desire to explore the unknown, and the desire to be alone with yourself, they both got started here. And we've got to go back to that if we want to preserve what we are."

"That seems to me very difficult. You people are already so wealthy."

"Years ago, I thought of going to a small country where I wouldn't hear the noise everybody makes. I picked Costa Rica. But while I was getting ready for the trip I found out an American company was doing business even there, and I gave up. That's why I'm here, in New England."

We came to the bend. I looked at my watch: more than two hours had gone by.

"I think I should go. They are waiting for me down there at Bread Loaf."

He reached out his hand to me. "Do you know the way?"

"Yes," I said. And I shook his hand. After I had taken a few steps, I heard his voice: "Come back soon! And, when you get back to New York, write to me. Don't forget."

I replied with a nod. I saw him go up the path, playing with his dog. "And he is seventy years old," I said to myself. As I walked back I remembered another solitary, another visit. "I think Robert Frost would have liked to know Antonio Machado. But how could they have understood each other? The Spaniard could not speak English and this poet knows no Spanish. No matter-they would have smiled at each other. I am sure they would have become friends immediately." I remembered the house at Rocafort, in Valencia, the wild, untended garden, the dusty living room and furniture. And Machado, with a dead cigar in his mouth. The Spaniard was also an elderly sage who had retired from the world and who also knew how to laugh and who was also absent-minded. He enjoyed philosophizing, like the Yankee, not in schools but out on the fringes. Two village sages, the American in his cabin, the Spaniard in his provincial cafe. Machado, too, professed that he was horrified by solemnity, and he had the same smiling gravity. "Yes, the New Englander has the cleaner shirt, and more trees in his look. But the other had the sadder and finer smile. There is much snow in this man's poems, but there are dust, antiquity, history in the other's. That dust of Castile, that dust of Mexico, which, when you barely touch it, sifts through your fingers . . ."

L.K.

E.E.c.u.mmings

[DELHI, 1965].

I read him for the first time in Berkeley in 1944. He dazzled me. Later, without losing my initial astonishment, I recognized in his work that rare alliance between verbal invention and pa.s.sionate fatality that distinguishes the poem from the literary fabrication. None of c.u.mmings's so-called extravagances-typography, punctuation, plays on words, syntax in which nouns, adjectives, and even p.r.o.nouns tend to become verbs-is arbitrary. His poetry is a game that, like all play, obeys a strict logic. And play, like poetry, partakes of the marvelous in that it sets necessity in motion to produce risk or something that resembles it: the unexpected. There is nothing less gratuitous than a composition by c.u.mmings; nothing more surprising. Play and pa.s.sion. Because c.u.mmings, the great innovator, is a poet of love, and for that reason he is also a poet of indignation. His satires and diatribes against the civilization and morality of his country are no less impa.s.sioned-and no less piercing-than his love poems. From the first book to the last, his is a young poetry-which the young very rarely write. It is said that he repeats himself. Perhaps it is true. It has to be added that, if there is no evolution in his work, there is also no descent. In his earliest poems he achieved a perfection that could only be called incandescent if it were not at the same time freshness itself. A springtime of flames.

c.u.mmings's poems are the children of calculation at the service of pa.s.sion. Has it been noted that pa.s.sion, in life as much as in art, demands a maximum of artifice for its satisfaction and is never content with reality unless it first trans.m.u.tes it into symbols? Eroticism tends toward ceremony; love is emblematical; curiosity grows exalted in front of enigmas-among the ancients, both a children's game and a rite of pa.s.sage. Conundrums, eroticism, love: systems of correspondence, languages in which not only objects, colors, and sounds but also bodies and souls are symbols. We live in a world of signs. All of c.u.mmings's images can be reduced to combinations of two signs: you and I. The rest of the p.r.o.nouns are obstacles or stimuli, walls or doors. The relationship between I and you is the copulative or adversative conjunction. The world is an a.n.a.logy of the primordial pair and its changes reflect those of the you and the I in their unions and separations. That you and I, generic but not impersonal, is the only personage in a great part of c.u.mmings's poetry. It is the pair of young lovers, alone in the society of their elders but in constant communication with the world of trees, clouds, rain. The world is their talisman and they are the world's talismans. The world and the p.r.o.nouns are separated by the interposing of inst.i.tutions, old men's beards, old women's coifs, generals' bombs, financiers' banks, the programs of the redeemers of the human race. There is a point of convergence between lovers and the world: the poem. There, the trees embrace, the rain undresses, the girl is renewed, love is a flash of light, the bed is a ship. The poem is an emblem of the language of nature and of bodies. The heart of the emblem is the verb: the word in motion, the motor and spirit of the phrase. Conjugation of bodies, copulation of the stars: the language resolves all oppositions in the metaphoric action of the verb. The syntax is an a.n.a.logy of the world and of the couple. c.u.mmings's universe may appear to be limited; if we penetrate toward the center, it is infinite.

In 1956 Donald Allen took me to c.u.mmings's house. He lived on a little street in Greenwich Village. The man won me with his cordiality and simplicity in the same way that the poet had won me with his shining perfection. His house was very tiny and ascetic. There were a few small pictures on the walls, painted by himself-none of them remarkable, although c.u.mmings did not like it to be forgotten that he was also a painter. He was not very tall. Thin, his eyes clear and lively, his teeth intact, his voice grave and rich in intonations, his hair cut short. Something of a clown, a mountebank, a magician-and that sporting air of the Anglo-Americans of his generation. He was dressed simply. The only dissonant note was a red silk tie, which he showed me happily. It was his birthday, and his wife had given it to him that morning. She was slender, with pale skin, black hair, a large mouth, and that airy solidity that Yankee women have, the daughters of Artemis: a beautiful woman and a beautiful skeleton. We drank tea and spent the afternoon chatting.

c.u.mmings told me that as a young man he had traveled through Spain in the company of John Dos Pa.s.sos. They were more excited by the villages and people than by the cities and monuments. He told me that, in spite of not knowing either our language or our literature, he had been much impressed by some of the Spanish writers of the time. Dos Pa.s.sos carried on long conversations with them and meanwhile I studied them: by turns they terrified me and made me laugh. It didn't matter that I couldn't understand what they were saying: I was satisfied with their physical presence, their gestures, the sound of their voices.

The shining of their eyes, the darkness of their beards, the rapture or reserve in their gestures, their silences, their interjections: Unamuno, Valle-Incln, Jimenez, Baroja, Gmez de la Serna? I could not be sure, and I doubt if he remembered accurately. But this sympathy was genuine. Those men seemed to him a spiritual landscape.

They were made of the same substance as the soil and air of Spain. That was something I missed in Paris and London. And, of course, in my own country. The degeneration of the human animal is even greater here: look what they've done with Pound.

He hated the spirit of systems, hence his antipathy toward the Communists. He was no less hostile toward the economic monopolies and political parties of his native land. He also disliked the universities and the poet-professors (a contempt he shared with William Carlos Williams, another solitary rebel, less furious and perhaps more profound than c.u.mmings). In those days Washington and its bureaucracy exasperated him: When are they going to free Pound? If Ezra is a war criminal, then so were Roosevelt and Truman. If he's crazy, he's no more so than our representatives and senators. At least he isn't mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded like the man who governs us.1 In his rebellion against the values of New England, where he was born, it was not difficult to hear an echo of the individualism of his Puritan ancestors. We are condemned to rebel against our fathers and thus to imitate them. It was quite late when we said good-by.

I saw him on other occasions^ each time I stopped off in New York. He sent me some of his books and we corresponded for a while. It occurred to me that one of his pieces might be put on the stage in Mexico. He was enthusiastic about the idea, but just at that time our small theatrical group-Poesa en Voz Alta [Poetry out loud]-broke up. The last time I saw him, a year before his death, he showed me some photographs his wife had taken: the houses of a cave-dwelling people on a mountain in I forget what country: "Don't they look like the skysc.r.a.pers of New York?" He laughed happily. "And my countrymen are so pleased with their progress. We haven't invented a thing." I told him that skysc.r.a.pers and those caves looked alike in the photograph but not in reality. He would not believe me: "But they're the same, the same." I told him I was living in Paris. He nodded: "I'd like to go back-though not especially. I'd rather go to Greece, where my daughter lives. I'd also like to go to Mexico. Your country is truly a country." I wanted to interrupt him. "No," he said, "I know what you're going to tell me. It's better that you aren't making progress." I said: "On the contrary, Mexico has taken a great leap." He shrugged his shoulders: "Well, as long as you don't imitate us. . . . The young poets in the United States? I don't believe in drugs as a system of poetic illumination. Poetry is made with a cool head and a blazing heart-or whatever other organ. Besides, they're repeating what we did twenty years ago. They haven't gone beyond Pound or Williams or what I've written myself." We drank tea again. The conversation turned to Europe and to whether life was less expensive on a Greek island or in a Mexican village. The lights came on in the little street. I have forgotten the rest.

I have met a number of Anglo-American poets and artists. None of them has given me that sense of extreme simplicity and refinement, humor and pa.s.sion, grace and daring-except the musician John Cage. But Cage is more intelligent and more complicated: a Yankee who might also be Erik Satie and an Oriental sage. Dadaism and Basho. c.u.mmings's humor is similar to boxing (which was a gentlemen's game at one time); Cage's is less direct and more corrosive. I hardly know what to think about his music (can one think about music?); on the other hand, I know that he is one of the few poets-despite the fact that he does not write poems-in the United States today. A strange country: it has given the world some of the great poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and all of them, with the exception of Whitman, have sought an interior or exterior exile-Poe and d.i.c.kinson, Pound and Eliot, c.u.mmings and Williams. It can be said that the same thing has happened in all of the countries in the western world: it is a characteristic phenomenon of modern times. That is true-except that the Anglo-Americans are more modern.