Published posthumously under the pseudonym Winterset Rothberg in Encounter (December 1963).
I THINK OF MY MORE TEDIOUS CONTEMPORARIES:
Roaring asses, hysterics, sweet-myself beatniks, earless wonders happy with effects a child of two could improve on: verbal delinquents; sniggering, mildly obscene souser-wowsers, this one writing as if only he had a penis, that one bleeding, but always in waltz-time; another intoning, over and over, in metres the expert have made hideous; the doleful, almost-good, overtrained technicians—what a mincing explicitness, what a profusion of adjectives, what a creaking of adverbs!
—And those life-hating hacks, the critics without sensibility, masters of a castrated prose, readers of one book by any given author (or excerpts thereof), aware of one kind of effect, lazy dishonest arrogant generalizers, tasteless anthologists, their lists of merit, their values changing with every whim and wind of academic fashion; wimble-wamble essayists; philosophers without premise; bony bluestocking commentators, full of bogus learning; horse-faced lady novelists, mere slop-jars of sensibility
—And those rude provincial American classicists, thumping along in a few clumsy staves, congratulating themselves in every other poem on their spiritual fortitude, their historical perspicacity, their ineffable god-like integrity; only-I-hear-it miniature Yvors, their sound effects usually the harsh rasp of a cracked kazoo; graceful anachronisms, trapped in one wavering collective image; again maundering Wordsworthians, becalmed in dear William’s Sky Canoe, throbbing back into the caves of cold dismay; timid Coleridges, swallowing Seconal, sucking at greasy reefers or dead cigars; undelightful bowerbirds wafting their faint quavers to enraptured sophomores; peripheral twitterers, their toes turned upward
—Two-dimensional dreamers: barnyard mystics, braying for eternity; Jesus-creeping somnambulist converts, clutching their rosaries, slobbering over fake Arab bones, unaware of anyone else, living or dead
—The duchess of could-you, would-you, with her acrid asides and her lady’s maid diction. (When I think of her, God thickens my tongue.)
—The professionally sincere; slug-nutty nihilists; misty-moisty mush-mouthed muttonheads; Arthur Saltonstall Robinson Flubb, iv; Henry Mortimer Clift, v; Miniver Cheevy Minsky, composer of salutes to space needles and astronauts; whistling ogres; metaphysical wailers; purveyors of tired literary ham-and-cheese, gefülte fish, dead bananas; crazy rhapsodical lady poets running between religious retreats and national bridge tournaments; suburban Sapphos, decked out like female impersonators, leaning over the podium, dugs a-droop, moaning, barking like sea-lionesses
—And that breathless bounding moon-faced bourgeois bully-for-you boy, beaming idiotic goodwill from every oily pore, blowing and billowing silly bromides, belching baked beans, inane homilies, inept praises, fake epiphanies, reveling in gracelessness, obtuse awkwardness, all wrong about everything that matters, mutters, or farts in a parcel
—And the professionally insane, stepping in and out of the madhouse as others would out of their baths, happy with their half-literate therapists, condemned out of their own mouths, self-indulgent, uncharitable, insentient.
—And what of the Dylan-adorers, white-eared, fawn-eyed, fervent? Or the two-bit cisatlantic tough guys making like Marlon Brando on a motor scooter, Edna St. Vincent Millay on a raft, Rupert Brooke in a balloon, Robert P. Tristram Coffin on a blueberry muffin?
O bottom hot-cake, O hesitant pretzel,
O mile-high meringue, O prodigious pudding,
O caperer in the Kangaroo Room,
O poet of the fireplug, the privet-hedge, the second floor, the back porch, the decayed brothel, the English Institute,
—O maimed waif of change!—
Was it reading you I first felt, full in my face, the hot blast of clatter of insane machinery?
Yet heard,
Beneath the obscene murderous noises of matter gone mad,
Whose grinding dissonance threatens to overwhelm us all,
The small cry of the human?
I, the loneliest semi-wretch alive, a stricken minor soul,
Weep to you now;
But I’ve an eye to your leaping forth and your fresh ways of wonder;
And I see myself beating back and forth like stale water in a battered pail;
Are not you my final friends, the fair cousins I loathe and love?
That man hammering I adore, though his noise reach the very walls of my inner self;
Behold, I’m a heart set free, for I have taken my hatred and eaten it,
The last acrid sac of my rat-like fury;
I have succumbed, like all fanatics, to my imagined victims;
I embrace what I perceive!
Brothers and sisters, dance ye,
Dance ye all!