ABSTRACT
Neither Racine, nor Pope, nor Goethe could have written surrealist poetry, or a novel of the American school, or Kafka’s Castle: any of these genres would have appeared to them, quite literally, senseless. Our own predicament lies less in lack of comprehension of what the French and English classics were trying to do, than in a sense of frustration, even disappointment. Their works often strike us as cold, as lacking sensitivity. We must make an effort to overcome our reluctance. We have perhaps become too woolly, too romantic, or insensitive to their kind of sensitivity. We find it difficult to appreciate how much they themselves enjoyed their kind of poetry.
