"The New Orthodoxies"

On her deathbed Gertrude Stein supposed to have asked: 'What is the answer?' After this she lay silent for some minutes. Then suddenly, raising herself up in bed, she asked: 'What is the question?' Then she died.

If this story be true, Miss Stein, on her deathbed, epitomized in these two questions the literary and aesthetic movement which began in the 1850's with Baudelaire noting that modern civilization created nothing to justify the continuation of life. Baudelaire, entering the universe of the Divine Comedy through the gateway of his own damnation, attempted to find his own answer to nineteenth-century materialism. But today we find the satanism absurd and the flowers of evil faded.

Even his insistence on being the poet pursued by furies, the albatross mocked by the hearties, is meretricious. Yet these histrionics do not challenge his position as the great primal modern poet. Why? The reason lies not in the answer but in a question: 'How can modern man, with his fallen nature, his classic past, and his role in eternity, live a significant spiritual life within the materialism of modern civilization?'

The reason why we can respect the satanism, the albatross, and the yearning for damnation is because they all serve to restate the problem--to pose the question. They remind us over and over again that man has to translate the life of his soul into the language of the modern city.--Stephen Spender