Abstract

Wordsworth in 1807 warned that the world was too much with us, that getting and spending we laid waste our powers, that we were giving our hearts away, and that we saw less and less in the external world, in nature, that the heart could respond to. In our modern jargon we call this "alienation.” That was the word by which Marx described the condition of the common man under Capitalism, alienated in his work. But for Marx, as Harold Rosenberg has pointed out, it is the factory worker, the businessman, the professional who is alienated in his work through being hurled into the fetish-world of the market. The artist is the only figure in this society who is able not to be alienated, because he works directly with the materials of his own experience and transforms them. Marx therefore conceives the artist as the model man of the future [...] Thus Rosenberg. And why do I associate him with Wordsworth? Simply because we have now a class of people who cannot bear that the world should not be more with them. Incidentally, the amusing title of Mr. Rosenberg's essay is “The Herd of Independent Minds.” Saul Bellow, recipient of three National Book Awards and of the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, was the first American to receive the International Literary Prize. His most recent novel, Humboldt's Gift, appeared this fall