Disjecta Membra: Clement Greenberg’s "The Renaissance of the Little Mag," 1941
Let us assume that the good writing wanted is the good writing of the future and not that of the past. It cannot be found by a blind search. Good writing does not grow like flowers in the fields, which need only a receptacle in order to become fruit, which awaits only a magazine with high standards and an open-minded policy, to come drifting in on the first wind. The editors of the little magazines don’t believe this entirely themselves, for they talk about stirring up good writing. The function of a little magazine is to be an agent. In order to act as an agent and stir up good writing there must be some kind of positive notion, some working hypothesis, a bias in a particular direction, even a prejudice, as to what this good writing of the future will be like. As Kant says, you only find what you look for. I don’t mean by this that it is necessary to be dogmatic and to have fixed ideas against which everything is to be measured. I mean simply that more thinking and inquiring should be done about the problem. And if the thinking is serious and bold enough, I am sure that important, exciting and germinative ideas will be turned up. […]
And if enough thinking and inquiring and speculating is done I’m sure that it will be found that the question cannot be solved in exclusively literary terms. What I am leading up to, to put it bluntly, is a call for a return to politics — not the politics of a particular party or faction, but thinking about politics. The revulsion against politics has been too extreme and at the same time, so to speak, defective. There has been a turning away from it, but not from the kind of emotion and the kind of literature politics helped produce. The pathos of Stalinism has been remembered, but hardly any of the ideas connected with the revolution. This pathos persists because politics in some form or other cannot be eliminated today. All important questions become political questions in a much more immediate sense than in the past. The world is that way now… So much of the latest poetry, for example, is alike in that it strives to reach the same tone, one of public portent. And public portent is political portent.
Odilon Redon, Profile of a Woman with a Vase of Flowers, 1895-1905. Tate.
But to be publicly portentous one must have opinions. Even Jeremiah had opinions. He not only predicted and anticipated doom and its emotions, but he also saw the logic of doom, its reason and sense, such as he could or would; i.e., he had opinions about doom. And to have serious opinions one must have ideas — political ideas. But one is afraid of political opinions; they involve you in partisanship and in arguments that have nothing to do with poetry. One is for culture, for everything that’s good, but one does not have political opinions.
I have neither the desire nor the capacity to lecture. And there are no prescriptions for good poetry. It is always hard to write, even under Queen Elizabeth. And it is not demanded that political ideas be or not be “injected” into contemporary poetry. Demands upon poetry are silly when they are made too specific. But since so many young poets… cannot tear themselves away from history, its present disasters, since they are always hearing the clock strike twelve, fists against the door, rifles firing in the next valley, since they insist on wondering about what’s going to happen to us all, they can be asked to try to understand history as well as they are able. If they do this, they will have ideas, and if they have ideas, they will have programs, and if they have programs, they will take sides. And as for their poetry — it will need less than now to be journalistic and modish in order to be pertinent. //
Georges Demeny, Fencer, 1906. The Met.
Review of Accent, Diogenes, Experimental Review, Vice Versa, and View, First Published in the Partisan Review Jan./Feb. 1941.
