POETS
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In a scene that draws forever the line between the poet and the square, Hamlet, prince and poet, converses with the busy bureaucrat Polonius:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: Tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.
Poets, their heads being in the clouds, are those who see whales and camels where others see only a chance of rain. That is why poets will always be more important than meteorologists. Poetry is a great imponderable, since it describes and changes the climate of the mind. It is a touchstone by which the spiritual condition of man may be tested.
In that respect, the testing is proceeding at a pace never before felt in the history of American literature. Two generations ago, many poets were at work in the U.S.—probably a greater number of major poets than at present —but their world seemed narrower. The literary quarterlies spent more space and passion discussing poetry, but their audience was limited. Slowly, poetry moved out of the parlors of overstuffed gentility into the academy. Now it is moving out of the academy—out of college lit courses and esoteric coteries—back to where it was when minstrels sang their verses in the marketplace. It exists once again in an ambiance of instant feeling. Poets are declaiming their works before large, theater-size audiences in the cities and on the campuses. Government grants, foundation funds and universities with chairs for poets-in-residence are all conspiring to strengthen or at least amplify their voices in the world at large. Their poetry books trip ever more briskly off the presses, and their phonograph recordings feed a flourishing market.
"There's poetry all over the place," says Robert Lowell. "The world is swimming with it. I think more people write it, and there are more ways to write it. It's almost pointless—there's no money in it—but a lot of them become teachers, and a lot of them write quite good poems and read to a lot of people. Poets are a more accepted part of society, and I don't know if it's bad for us or not, but it's pleasanter. I don't suppose even now parents are very glad when their children become poets, but it's not such a desperate undertaking. Still, being good isn't any easier."
Robert Lowell, 50, is better than good. As far as such a judgment can ever be made of a working, living artist, he is, by rare critical consensus, the best American poet of his generation.
What They Seek. As Critic Edmund Wilson puts it, Lowell has achieved a poetic career on the old 19th century scale. Of the score or so of American poets who now stir the campuses, he is easily the most admired. Not that the suspicious young readily take to heroes, literary or otherwise, or are very clear about what they seek in poetry. Says Mount Holyoke Poet and History Professor Peter Viereck: students "crave the ever more shocking and ever more new. They are looking more for emotional release than purely artistic merit." Verse for edification or moral uplift; he adds, "is totally dead. A poem like Tennyson's Merlin and the Gleam would be the laughingstock of a coffeehouse today."
Says Albert Gelpi, assistant professor of poetry at Harvard: