The desire to escape illusion, to create a poetry free of the magician's falsely beautiful flowers and falsely horrid passions, enjoys a desperate popularity in America. Illusion is dismissed as corruption. Artifice is condemned as dishonesty. The evocation of delectable possibilities, rather than the presentation of prison- like “realities,” is viewed as absurd. “Life itself “ must permeate poetic art. The mundane must appear as mundane, in bland lines that echo and mimic only “real” speech. The invention of other worlds, along with the idea that language itself can paint stunning if illusionary universes of its own, full of pointed and revealing suggestiveness, is regarded as an inane anachronism. Fiction too is inappropriate, and best left to the fiction writers. The jetty- bright soul whose passions are evil, as well as the magenta rose of the soul whose passions are saintly, pales to extinction in an American poetic idiom that lacks the range to limn all but the sensate, the social, the domestic. Significance, especially spiritual significance, is scorned as a rancid effusiveness. Poetry must explore only the dreams and miseries of the new petit bourgeois imagination.

These attitudes are common among American writers of so- called free verse, but not limited to them. The same narrow and torpid mental formulae may be discovered— they are seldom stated outright— in the poetry of many of the recent formalists. To be sure, a poet's attitudes should form the subject matter of criticism only when they affect the poet's art, emboldening his techniques or crippling them. The antidemocratic sentiments of Baudelaire scarcely influence the craft and compassion of his poems, and are unimportant to reading him with delight. The superstitious paganism of Lucretius is no hindrance to his creating a spectacular cosmic imagery, or to understanding his genius as a poet. The poetry of Ronsard is neither improved nor harmed by his advocacy of monarchical government. His limpid grace and candor shine through. The same cannot be said of the anti- illusionism of many contemporary poets, including in various ways the four poets to be considered here, whose similarities of limitations are at once typical and frustrating, far surpassing their peculiar achievements.