ABSTRACT
Not even the present world situation is more delicate than the diplomatic relations between the Muse and the Machine. Conceivably this protest, in part, was merely the hurt vanity of artists at being snubbed as "useless" in a machine age. Hell hath no fury like a Muse scorned. Statistics would show that more poets refer to the railroad train than to any other form of machinery. Writers on the anti-mechanist side fall into at least four separate groups with entirely different motives for being anti. The groups include the esthetic wincers; pious scorners; back-to-instinct prophets; and trapped individualists. In Soviet literature two acts of suicide – Mayakovski and Yesenin's – equally terminated her greatest pro-mechanist poetry and her greatest anti-mechanist poetry. On the pro-mechanist side, at least four distinct groups are: middle-class materialists; socialist materialists; gadget cultists; lion-tamers.
