I

N one of those downtown New York gustatory temples which the mid

day appetites of corporation executives have caused to flourish some fifty men were lunching. They represented a half-dozen large enterprises all made kin through the stock control of one great holding company. Presently, when broiled fresh mackerel, creamed potatoes, green peas, coffee, and pumpkin pie should have been consumed and fifty cigars should have begun to fill the room with an imported haze, one of the men would talk upon a phase of business about which he knew a great deal, and the others would give him contented and drowsy attention.

The men were seated in small groups. At one table five or six of them, typical of American industry-alert in appearance, youngish but prematurely gray, well dressed, a little too well fed-attempted to look as if they were enjoying themselves. There was a vice-president of a great manufacturing company, an advertising manager of a tremendous distributing company, a research engineer, a personnel man, the inevitable statistician. These men were leaders. They directed certain phases of great undertakings. They were university men, had been exposed to the cultural influences of university life. Their opinions were respected. Advice which they gave in their particular fields was readily followed. And yet there they sat smiling to cover a curious embarrassment not unlike that of small boys in a dancing class standing all together scuffing their patent-leather pumps on one side of the hall, while the little girls giggle and chatter on the other.

The personnel man spoke up. It was part of his profession to sense a strained situation and to do something about, it.

"Have any of you seen the Quinn Collection?" he inquired. (This collection was receiving much newspaper notice at the time.)

Heavy silence.

Then the advertising manager, "What the hell is that?"

"A collection of 'modern' paintings bought by the late John Quinn, the lawyer. Some of them are pretty interesting."

"Don't try to tell me," said the advertising manager, cutting an eye around to

Company Men

By STERLING PATTERSON

The corporation has done exceptional things for the country at large. It has helped to achieve shorter hours, higher wages, brought about improvements in working conditions undreamed of few a years ago. Its laboratories are making some of the foremost discoveries in science. What does it do to the individual? Mr. Patterson, himself a corporation employee, attempts to answer.

see if his words met with approval, "that you really like that junk."

Relieved laughter. The personnel man subsided.

Silence again.

"Say, T. J.," the vice-president speaking to the research engineer and to the table at large, “I hear you've got a new way of running your furnace. Save a lot of coal?"

Relief on every face. Here was conversation, safe conversation. No chance here to express an opinion with which your superior might not agree. You had gone into furnaces with him before. You knew his "slant" on furnaces. Good, safe ground. That was what was needed to make a business luncheon move along pleasantly. What was the idea in bringing up this Cézanne and Picasso stuff, anyway? A business man is not supposed to know anything about art. Let a man eat his luncheon in peace-and talk about furnaces and golf and busi

ness.

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ow this is amusing enough in its way. It is easy to dismiss such an incident with a "Ho, hum! More Babbitry," except for the fact that these men are not and never were Babbitts. To begin with, Babbitt was a fool. These men are anything but fools. They are the managerial brains of the country.

Babbitt was small town. These men are New York, Chicago, Baltimore. Except for a desire to please, to do the right thing, to be good fellows, along with a fear that they will not quite be able to accomplish it—a trait they share with that prince of clowns, Ed WynnBabbitt and the managers of American industry have little in common. Furthermore, in this particular instance, the

vice-president was a man of broad cultural instincts. He was keen about painting. In point of fact, he had twice visited the Quinn Collection. The research engineer had attended the showing, too, and had found himself rather bored. The advertising manager, as a purchaser of drawings, should have gone but had not. The statistician, a former newspaper man, who could not get over the habit of reading at least three papers in the morning and even more in the afternoon, had seen the exhibition.

If these men had been dining together in the home of one of them, they would without question gladly have talked about these paintings. Can the mere fact that they wore sack suits instead of dinner coats, that it was lunch time instead of after six o'clock, have prevented chatting of an exhibition about which many a column had appeared in the daily press? The thing furnished as legitimate table talk as the stock market, the newest musical show, the latest murder. It was not the sort of thing for which a man has a secret passion, a thing which he brings into the light of day in the presence of his intimates only. It was material for pleasant, not altogether moronic conversation. Now why, in the name of all that is intelligent, were they loth to discuss a subject which in truth was interesting to every one of them? What is it that makes a corporation man hide the light of his individuality beneath the bushel of fatuity? What is it that corporations do to people?

It may be that an attempt to answer this question is important. Certainly, one of America's great contributions to the present economic state of things has been the huge corporation with its quantity production, its lowered costs, its thousands upon thousands of employees. The number of persons employed now by business corporations, according to the most recent estimates, has reached the astounding total of 19,000,000some forty-three per cent of the total number of people gainfully employed in the United States. The growth of the corporation, along with other economic developments, has brought to the workman increased wages, shorter hours, more continuous employment, better working conditions, material comforts undreamed of a few decades ago. Big business is now bidding against the pro

fessions (and with increasing success) for the human material which it must convert into its brain workers, its managers. With its growing problems in labor, engineering, manufacture, distribution, and finance increasing difficulty lies in discovering executive material. The needs of industry grow faster than incipient managers can be turned out, faster than promising young men in industry can be trained and promoted, and we see dawn into the corporate cosmos professors, army and naval officers, newspaper men, lawyers, editors, exCabinet members, judges, publishers, as well as thousands of young college grad

uates.

And yet, allow these professional men, these college graduates, these men who have come up to managerial rank "through the hawse pipe," to remain executives for ten years, and what have you? Types. Company men-as alike as Brooks Brothers' suits, as individual as peas. If one man still has originality left in him, he stands out like a teetotaler at a college reunion.

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HERE is no implication here that the company man does not do his work well. By and large, he is extremely competent in the carrying out of his duties. However, so functionalized has big business become, so bolstered and protected with staff experts are executives, that the duties of the individual are far from arduous. Not that a great deal of committee forming and conferring and consulting and approving and smoking of cigars is not necessary to the making of the simplest decision. It seems to be. Indeed, the executive comes to believe, or at least to act as if he were, the busiest and most harassed man in the world. As a matter of fact, he puts in about four hours a day in actual work. The rest is shadow boxing. Now and then a remarkable man will recognize this and act accordingly. The president of a large corporation, a man still in his forties, has all during his business career been noted for coming in late in the morning and leaving early in the afternoon. Of him it is said that "he can do more work than any two men in a given time." Possibly, that is a way not only of, admitting his brilliance but of pointing out his ability to concentrate on essentials during his brief working day. And what a reputation for originality he has, forsooth, because he does not conform to the customary nine-to-five schedule!

Distinctly, he is an exception. Your company man ordinarily is afraid to come in too late in the morning; afraid

to leave too early in the afternoon. If there is not much to do and he is frightfully bored, he cannot tell his secretary that he is leaving early just because he wants to. No, indeed. He either must have a "conference" uptown from which he can withdraw to catch an earlier train home than usual; or he has to play golf with So-and-So purely in the interest of business; or his wife has not been well and needs him at home; or something he had for luncheon has disagreed with him and he thinks he would better go home early. Always, he must have an excuse, must move in safety. Your company man (unless he be in a publicity department, which, as all corporation men are aware, is composed of temperamental radicals, Bolsheviks, and plain nuts) does not wear a soft collar; he never lets his hair grow long even though it might be more becoming to him that way; he feels terribly self-conscious if he carries a stick; and he would no more dare raise a beard than he would nominate William Randolph Hearst for President of the United States. Your company man, when some plan is presented to him, is not likely to praise it. Instead, he asks, "Have you had Mr. Dolittle's view on that?" Or, "Suppose you check up on that with Mr. Tomtit and Mr. McHorn and Mr. Gulch, and bring it back to me when you have found out what their slant is." And if Mr. Tomtit or Mr. McHorn condemn the proposal, he joins in and makes it unanimous, especially if either of those gentlemen happen to outrank him. Your company man easily falls into the habit of criticising every proposal or suggestion made to him. To be sure, it is difficult to avoid when so much of his work essentially is picking flaws, weighing the merits of cases.

There was an officer of a company who was accustomed to having the speeches which it was necessary for him to deliver from time to time before trade organizations written for him by one of the bright young men on his staff. On this particular occasion a draft of the proposed address was delivered, and received the expected comment: "I don't like that here and here and here. Better do it over." Back went the bright young man. In a few days he laid a revised version upon his chief's desk. "Pretty good this time," was the verdict, "but you'd better change this part and this part. I always find that a speech has to be written three times before it is any good." Now it happened that the bright young man was busy with other things. He took a chance. He allowed a few days to pass, then brought with

him a clean copy of his original draft and presented himself before the vicepresident. This time the officer read the paper slowly and thoughtfully.

"My boy," he beamed when he had finished, "this is fine. Exactly right. Now why couldn't you have done that the first time you wrote it?"

Impossible? Not a bit of it. Absolutely true, although cases of this kind are obviously unusual.

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ow why is your company man hypercritical? Why is he afraid to wear a soft collar? Why is he afraid to be away from his desk without an alibi? Why is he loth to indorse a proposal without waiting for the approval of a half-dozen other men? Why is he afraid to be himself? Just this: He has a boss. If he does not please that boss, he may lose his job. If he does please him, he increases his chances of progress with his organization.

The privately owned corporation today is disappearing. Control has passed to the public, and professional, hired management is in the saddle. Company men, therefore, are employees. All of them-workers, straw bosses, foremen, department heads, officers are employees, not owners. And, despite a realization that a "boss"-largely dependent for his success upon those who report to him is limited in his ability to discharge men, the employee always is stalked, no matter how dim the outline may be, by the specter of dismissal. He must please the man or men he is working for to get ahead. The worker reports to the gang boss; the gang boss reports to the sub-foreman; the subforeman reports to the foreman; the foreman reports to the department head; the department head reports to the vicepresident; the vice-president reports to the president; the president reports to the board of directors, and through them to the stockholders, the public. And if the worker, the department head, and the officer of a company are also a part of that stock-owning public, there is all the more reason why each company man should be willing to submerge his personality in his company, to conform, in the hope that by so doing he may increase the assets of the business.

The quite human tendency toward imitation, furthermore, makes for a lack of independence in the company man. A department head, let us say, gains his exalted position through his enthusiasm, his friendliness, his good fellowship, along let us trust—with a modicum of ability in his work. His methods have brought him success. He comes to be

lieve, therefore, that his methods are the best methods. He encourages his men -more often than not unconsciouslyto accept him as a pattern. His men, on the other hand, want to go forward in the organization. To do this they know they must please their superior, not only in the quality of their work but in lesser ways. If the "boss" objects to a certain kind of collar, what more natural than to dispense with it? If the "boss" thinks that excessively vigorous hand-shaking is the way to register cordiality, what more natural than to greet callers as if one were cranking an old-fashioned flivver? If the "boss" believes that a slap on the back gets more orders than an instinctive regard for a customer's dignity, what more natural than to become addicted to shoulder pounding?

Most men enter a large organization when they are young, ambitious, anxious to learn how to get on. It is to be expected that they will learn, as they learned as children, largely by imitation. It is a rare executive, as it is a rare parent, who attempts to foster and encourage individuality. A thoughtful business man was once asked why men who held positions of real responsibility were inclined to look with something akin to awe at those who ranked them. He was reminded that all men are very much alike; that, no matter how important a man might seem when glowering behind his mahogany desk, he had to wash his face and brush his teeth like any lesser mortal. This was was his reply: "We started, most of us, as clerks and office boys. Our bosses seemed gigantic, successful figures-miles above us. We progressed in the organization. So did they. Always they were ahead of us. The relative distance between us has remained constant. When we both get into the executive group, we pretend a certain intimacy. They call us by our first names, as they did when we were office boys. We call them by their initials. That is a compromise between the basis of friendship on which executives are supposed to operate and our instinctive feeling-left over from office-boy days-that we ought to call them Mister Blank."

when to break the rules. For the average able citizen, every infraction of the written or understood regulations counts against him, no matter how well he may carry on his work. If he arrives at his office late, if he is not at his desk when his chief wants to see him, if he does not seem to be laboring at a terrific pace whether he is busy or not, his progress is endangered.

It is possible that the overshadowing of the individual by the glorification of the institution is essential to the successful conduct of great affairs. But does it not seem that such a program would tend to rob management of the very traits daring, initiative, couragewhich it most needs? If these qualities did not persist in the individual in spite of the corporate atmosphere's tendency

to

remove them, it is questionable whether big business as we know it today could survive. Nevertheless they do persist; but they persist because the individual-while camouflaging his true self with a surface conformity-will, if he be strong, fight for his individuality with all the vigor that a small boy displays in recovering a snatched cap. The successful man, the man who comes closest to the realization of his capabilities, is always, despite the massed mediocrity surrounding him, despite the waves of standardization seeking to engulf him, an individual.

Among the words which bob most frequently to the corporate surface, since "service" has been worn so threadbare, are specialization and standardization. Doubtless, they represent practices which have proved enormously efficient in a material way; but they have at the same time helped considerably to make the company man what he is today.

A

ists, can he talk with understandingly? In all probability, very few. Unless he be the exceptional man who struggles consciously to keep up with the tide of human affairs, his personality has become a "scientific purchasing personality."

Actually, there have been discovered foremen who after twenty-five years with an organization have never even walked through the department next to theirs have never left their own particular bailiwicks except to go home at the end of the day.

It must be pointed out that industry is conscious of the losses it may have suffered through allowing a man's horizon to become so narrowed. Many companies have evolved systems which transfer employees from one department to another. Broader business minds result, and the possibility of discovering men who can develop into general executives is increased. Hobbies, for reasons of health as well as for a possible broadening influence, are being encouraged. The employee magazine not only attempts to educate along industrial and economic lines today, but makes an effort to stimulate reading and thinking beyond the narrow confines of commercial activity.

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TANDARDIZATION, on the other hand, when applied to human beings is not narrowing. It is suffocating. Material things-telephone systems, automobiles, sewing-machines, typewriters -thrive under standardization. An automatic screw machine spits out thousands of screws, each more perfect than a skilled workman could possibly hope to make by hand. But a system under which men write alike, talk alike, think alike, does not create an ideal condition for individual development. If the regulations of most companies were brought out in book form, they would rival that great substitute for the human brain, "Army Regulations." Letters must be written thus and so; margins must be so deep; such and such forms must be used; all correspondence originating in Department 1776-Y must go out over the signature of department function 1.2; Form 1-Ab must be used. "We'd better handle that matter according to standard practice." "How did we hanIdle it last time?”

Efficient? Quite. But is it the best thing in the world for individual cerebral progress to have a man start his letters "In reference to your memo of the 6th;" or to refer to any suggestion, proposal, or notion as a "proposition;" (Please turn to continuation, page 640)

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ISS DICKINSON'S devoted readers are few, but those who

are familiar with the history of her reputation will scarcely need to be reminded of the uncertainty of judgment that nearly all her critics have displayed. Not only have they been undecided about her in everything but their admiration; they have not looked for her problem; for they have not made up their minds why they are perplexed. To accuse them of incompetence would solve nothing, even if it were just to do so. Mr. Conrad Aiken, a sensitive and intelligent critic, has led her defense with an able communication to the public of the quality of her poetry; this, and even more of the same kind of criticism, is necessary while the audience for poetry remains hard to move, as it is likely ever to be. If Miss Dickinson has not been understood, it is because we lack a critical tradition, a body of assumptions, passed on from generation to generation, which alters as the spirit of literature alters yet, in its comprehension of the past with the present, remains clear and fundamentally the same. Our criticism of poetry seldom gets beyond impressionism; it starves in the famine of general ideas. If Emily Dickinson had been an English poet, she would, of course, have been better understood. This is not true; she might have fared worse. Not even the French, the masters of criticism, could have done better by her than we. By this I mean that her case is special.

She is, perhaps, even more than Hawthorne the special case of nineteenthcentury Puritanism. The intellectual climate into which she was born, in 1830, had (as all times have) the features of a transition; but the period was a major crisis culminating in the Civil War, before and after which, in New England as well as in the South, the crises are definitely minor. The theocracy declined; industrialism rose; and the energy of the former went over, degraded, into the latter.

The idea which moved the theocratic state permeated all New England society. It gave a definite meaning to life, to the life of pious and impious, of learned and vulgar alike; it gave-and this is the thing to remember-a tragic meaning, an heroic proportion, to the experience of the individual. Socially we may not like the New England idea; yet the critic of literature must not lose sight

By ALLEN TATE

Emily Dickinson's poetry has been for many as great an enigma as her life. But her few devoted readers will welcome this analysis of the poet and her work, which is one of a series of papers on America's literary figures revalued in the light of contemporary criticism. Allen Tate is himself a poet and author; "Stonewall Jackson" is his most recent work.

of its value to literature; it dramatized the human soul.

BUT

UT after 1830 the great fortunes were made, and New England became a museum where the knickknacks, the fine laces and china, the pieces of Oriental jade, the chips off the leaning

dissipated." Hawthorne alone in his time kept the primitive vision pure, in the primitive terms, and in him the Puritan tragedy reaches the climax: man is measured by a great idea outside himself, and is found wanting. In Emerson, man is greater than any idea, and, being himself the Over-Soul, is potentially perfect; there is no struggle because (I state the position in its extreme terms) there is no possibility of error; there is no drama because there is no "tragic fault." After Emerson New England literature loses its life and intensity. Except in Emily Dickinson. There is Hawthorne looking back; there is Emerson looking ahead. Miss Dickinson, who has something of both, comes in somewhere between.

ER biography remains to be written.

cosmopolitan learning, were displayed as the evidence of a superior culture. Culture, as a matter of fact, was disappearing. Where the old order of feeling gathered up the scattered personal experience into a comprehensible whole, the new tended to flatten out the common experience, to exalt the personal, the unique. This does not mean that the mid-nineteenth-century New Englander was an individualist; he conformed. It means that where his grandfather had been concerned with the common idea of the redemption-that is to say, with the search for truth-he looked to his personal respectability. History yields on this point a paradox: when a great idea common to all men, a kind of supporting fate that all men participate in, breaks up, society moves toward an external uniformity which is, perhaps, the measure of the spiritual chaos within. Emerson appeared; looked at the scene, seeing only the uniformity, and supposed it to be due to the persistent tyranny of the theological idea. He set out to destroy it. He succeeded, and he accelerated the tendency in New England society that he disliked. It was a great intellectual mistake, for by it Emerson became unwittingly the prophet of industrialism and, historically speaking, hoisted himself on his own petard. He destroyed self on his own petard. He destroyed the Puritan drama of the soul.

A secular, didactic order supervened. "After Emerson had done his work," says Mr. Robert Penn Warren, "any tragic possibilities in that culture were

Be

now withheld are known and arranged by a person more competent than Mrs. Bianchi, the outline itself will probably be no clearer, the solution to her personal enigma no easier. The outline, of course, will be fuller; but this may not really assist the understanding, however much it may feed the devotion that Miss Dickinson calls out of her admirers. There is no poet in American literature who is so closely bound up with his poetry, no one of whom it is so accurate to say that the poet is the poetry. cause this is true it is all the more difficult to explain (I mean correlate) the double fact of her life and work. The poetry is rich in a profound and various experience whence did it come? The poems of Emily Dickinson have a certain absolute position above the personal life that she led. It is dangerous to accept the present-day belief that her life, her thwarted love, gave serious direction to her poetry; even more dangerous to suppose that it made her a poet.

The mystery of poetry is great, but the mystery of why some persons become poets is exactly equal to the mystery of why others become carpenters or bank

interest is false. It is reasonable, of It is reasonable, of course, to suppose that her love affair made her a recluse, but there is a great discrepancy, a great disjunction, between what her seclusion produced and what brought it about; it is quite as reasonable to suppose that another experience of another kind might have brought her to the same result.

The meaning of her seclusion is the problem we must keep in mind-the meaning of her decision (it must have been deliberate, or deliberately observed by her) to withdraw to her upstairs room and spend her best years imposing her own flashing constructions upon a dimly explored real world. The fact that she went upstairs is not very important. The fact that it must have been her only way of acting out her part in the history of her culture, which made a single demand in various ways upon all of its representatives-this is of the greatest consequence. Her seclusion was the fulfillment of her life. All pity for Miss Dickinson's "starved life" is misdirected. Her life was one of the deepest, one of the richest ever lived out on this continent. She is one of the few Americans who have realized themselves.

For when she went upstairs and closed the door she mastered life by rejecting it. Others had done it in their way before; still others did it later. The love affair was incidental, a kind of pretext; she would have found another. (It was probably not an incident that her lover was a married man.) Mastery of the world by rejecting the world is the doctrine of Edwards and Mather, the meaning of fate in Hawthorne; it is the exclusive theme in Henry James.

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ETWEEN Hawthorne and James there is an epoch. The temptation to sin in Hawthorne is in James transformed into the temptation not to do "the decent thing." A whole world-scheme has shrunk to the dimensions of the personal conscience. For James found himself in the post-Emersonian world. He could not undo Emerson's work; he could only escape from its physical presence, could only take his people to Europe upon the vain quest of something that they had lost at home; his characters, fleeing the wreckage of the Puritan culture, preserved only their honor. It was a kind of stoicism. Its beginnings are in Emily Dickinson.

Between her and Hawthorne there is a difference of intellect. It might be said, indeed, that she lacks utterly the intellect in its capacity to conceive and analyze abstractions. Hawthorne was,

in a narrow sense-his narrowness was

his intensity-a master of ideas; he seems to be aware of the abstract, the doctrinal equivalent of the action of his tales; he was prepared to reason out the ethics of his conflicts. Prepared to reason it out. He seldom did. As a master of ideas, he was not mastered by them. He was an artist. Miss Dickinson was spared the risk that imperiled a man like Hawthorne, for she could not reason at all. She sees. The Puritan drama Miss Dickinson, as a lyric poet, takes clear off the intellectual stage; its reasoned proportions are gone; the feeling, the values, the approach to life, remain the same. The proportions of the Puritan myth are gone in Emerson too; but the difference between him and the poet of Amherst is that he possesses a new feeling which is in revolt against the feeling that she is still able to accept. The difference between her and Hawthorne is the difference between a lyric poet and a historian of conduct in the same degree of acceptance of their tradition.

Miss Dickinson's intellectual "deficiency" is, for her purpose, her greatest distinction. She is not the only great figure in New England. She is the only poet. Given her talent, her lack of "ideas" made her the supreme poet of her time, one of the great poets of the world.

HILOSOPHERS Must have ideas, and the trouble with most nineteenthcentury poets is that they are nearer being philosophers than poets, and in the true sense far from being either. Their ideas were not clarified by the intense application to them of feeling. They are seldom realized in the intensity, in the unity of vision; the ideas are mixed with the poetry, but not fused. There have been poets-Dante, Lucretius, Racine, perhaps Milton-who were not spoiled for their true business by looking through the medium of a rational scheme of ideas. Milton's greatness consists less in his gigantic story, less in the reach of his theological figures, than in their moral equivalent deeply embedded in his character; this world-scheme is as profoundly implied, if not expressed, in "Lycidas" as in "Paradise Lost." (There have been long poems-Young's “Night Thoughts," Pollock's "The Course of Time"-poems of epic dimensions, which contain no major poetry.) Majority in poetry is not to be confused with the measurable grandeur, with the bigness, of the poet's world. It is a quality, not a quantity. Sometimes the epic dimension accompanies and visibly supports the major poem; sometimes not. In Miss Dickinson it does not.

Yet it is there. It is there, with differences, much as it is in Shakespeare. It is present in all great poets; for all great poets have culture even if they are not "cultured." In Emily Dickinson the world-order is subordinated, as it is in Shakespeare, to the poetic vision. It might be said that the greatness of a poet depends, first, upon the thoroughness of his absorption in a world-scheme like the Puritan theology, and, secondly, upon the degree to which he is unconscious that he is working in such material. It is precisely this situation that Shakespeare emerges from-the decay of the medieval world as a rigid pattern of life, the pattern yet remaining, as feeling, in the sensibilities of men. (The Southern United States have just undergone such a change, and are probably yet to be heard from in literature. The past in New England was destroyed earlier, if less dramatically, and from within.) Miss Dickinson came upon the equilibrium of an old and a new order; Puritanism to her was no longer the rigid mold it had been, it had become the pulse of her life.

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something of the same historical situation produced Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, it does not follow that they are the same kind of poet, seeing with the same vision, taking equal rank in the hierarchy of literature. I mean that their general situation often makes possible a rare kind of poetone who is specially pure of systematized ideas. People used to go to Shakespeare to see what he "thought" about morals, politics, religion; the truth is, his peculiar quality is largely due to his never having "thought" at all; his truth is not in what he says, not in the content of his expression, but in the intensity of his dramatic vision. Miss Dickinson is equally innocent of intellectualism. (Her poetry is hard to understand, but that is not intellectualism.) She wrote to T. W. Higginson that she had no education, and it was true. She never reasoned about the world around her; she looked at it; and the world within her rose up, its depths concentrated in the slightest of her perceptions.

This world within her gave her gift for poetry its full sweep. It is not true to say that the poet alone in a given time has such an inner world, such an ordered universe; the other people of the same culture have it too. The poet differs from them only in the gift for raising up his culture to a life in words, to a concentration of its values. He may even hate his age; he may attack it, as Dante did, or he may be an outcast, as