Some Recent Books of Poetry

No words, a few years ago, were used with more disparaging force, in connection with poetry, than such words as ‘cosmic’ or ‘metaphysical.’ Mr. Ezra Pound’s decalogue of ‘don’ts’ was chiefly aimed at extirpating the post-Victorian rash of high seriousness; and everyone remembers how successful were most of the English Georgians, the American realists, and the imagists in both countries, in avoiding monumentality. Everyone realizes, too, how salutary and how inevitable was this reaction against the grand manner at its emptiest; but ’tapioca imitating pearls’ — as an English critic once said — is not in itself more precious than ‘gravy imitating lava’; and now that poetry has recaptured its cunning in the use of the slighter and humbler instruments, one can hardly lament its very marked return (in the last decade) to its necessary concern with the soul. In four or five volumes of verse that have appeared this season, the presence of the metaphysical is too commanding to escape notice.

It is present — almost in the technical literary sense that Johnson gave the word in his life of Cowley—in Elinor Wylie’s posthumous poems, Angels and Earthly Creatures; and this is the chief surprise in a very surprising volume.

Now that we have the whole body of her work to judge by, we should find it easy to do justice to Mrs. Wylie’s essential quality. But certainly it has not been unnatural, hitherto, to think of her as mainly a worker in surfaces, an expert lapidary, a writer aiming at decoration rather than density. Her manner has always been a highly personal one, and there have been reasons for accusing her of mannerism. Did the colors in her cut stones have any heat in them, or were they merely prismatic? Angels and Earthly Creatures is the answer. No poet capable of such concentration, such intellectual ardor, such sublimated vivacity, is to he disposed of as a dealer in bijouterie. The old superficial lustre is still here: the words are still juxtaposed with the nicety and stiffness with which one piece of colored glass is set against another. But the lustre is plainly a result of firing, and the words are more translucent than any glass.

The best of these poems have a long life before them, and will be familiar to all literate people: for the moment, a reviewer need perhaps only observe how energetically the nineteen love sonnets combine a strongly personal substance with a clear ideality of statement; how strangeness is subtly translated into something beyond strangeness in ‘Chimæra Sleeping’; how ‘classical’ is the poise and outline of the three fine philosophical poems, ‘Absent Thee from Felicity Awhile,’ ‘Hymn to Earth,’ ‘This Corruptible’; and how clear and piercing is the note struck in several of the songs and elegies. Every reader will he conscious of the influence in these poems of the Jacobean and Caroline metaphysicians and mystics: they could not have been written by a poet who was not steeped in Donne and Crashaw and Marvell. But it will not escape the hastiest eye that something more than a literary influence is at work: the diction may be that of the seventeenth century; the couplets may move with the unmistakable slow gait of the school before Dryden; but the final effect is of freshness, immediacy, and truth. The hands are the hands of Donne, but the voice is the voice of Elinor Wylie.

No one can pretend that Cavender’s House forces us to revise our impression of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s genius in the same way. It is, indeed, a highly characteristic poem, and could only have been written by the author of Avon’s Harvests Roman Bartholow, and The Man Who Died Twice. Rut it. is a better poem than any of these three, bike them, it may he described as glorified melodrama; like them, it deals with jealousy and violent crime and inquisitorial remorse; like theirs, its special effect depends partly on the presence of Mr. Robinson’s somewhat ghastly humor. Hut whether because the intrusive narrator of the other three poems is dropped out, or because Cavender himself is more interesting than the other protagonists, this latest poem rises above the others in the singleness of its drift, in its sustained tension, and in its emblematic largeness. Parenthetically it may be said that Mr. Robinson’s blank verse has never been more resourceful, more athletic, or more fastidiously adapted to the introspective drama of his subject.

If Cavenders House were merely a glorified melodrama, it would have the interest that attaches to all studies of men or women in straits; and many readers will probably stop with the story of Cavemler and Laramie. But Mr. Robinson has always been more than a poetical biographer: he has been interested not only in character, even character in ‘crisis.’ but in the essential problems of experience itself. The present poem has a. metaphysical as well as a psychological matrix. No poet ever had a deeper feeling for doubtfulness than Mr. Robinson; no poet ever shrugged his shoulders more dubiously in the presence of the cardinal questions; and it. is extraordinarily impressive to sec him, in this poem, making doubt, suspicion, distrust, the mainsprings of the tragic action. If Cavender had been able to rise above skepticism, his life would not have ended so ingloriously; and that is what he now realizes as his own conscience, embodied in the spirit, of his murdered wife, declares it to him: —

Laramie knows what are the difficulties in the way of belief, but, unlike the old Lavender, she is willing to look bevond them: —

Such affirmations are not very robust or very breezy, but in the murky tragic atmosphere of a Robinsonian narrative they have a particular weight and relevance.

Something of the same sort might conceivably be said of the hopeful note on which Edgar Lee Masters ends The Fate of the Jury, for there has been plenty of spleen, plenty of indignation, plenty of protest, contra mundum, before we reach page 172. But, unlike Mr. Robinson, Mr. Masters is incapable of making poetry of these materials; and, as a result, both the indignation and the hopefulness remain purely personal emotions with him at the end. His poem aims at a certain largeness of effect: if it is not cosmic, it is at any rate rather vastly sociological in its drift; and the characters speculate at some length on ultimate questions. Unhappily, the language into which it is all thrown is pretentious and commonplace; in these respects, it is only too clearly the concomitant of the thought.

Readers who remember Mr, Masters’s Domesday Book of a decade ago will perhaps be interested in this sequel. The earlier poem, which was compared with The Ring and the Book, was a study, from innumerable angles, of the ‘case’ of the murdered Elinor Murray, who thus symbolized the relativity of human judgment, and was also made to symbolize, one forgets in detail just how, the America of her generation. The coroner who was the leading figure in Domesday Book is also the leading figure here; The Fate of the Jury is partly a narrative of Merival’s love affair with the elusive Arielle and his life with her, and partly a series of self-revelations by live or six of the jurymen in the case. Nothing could be duller than the blank verse in which it is all set forth; and, reluctant as one must be to discredit the creator of Spoon River, one must acknowledge that nothing could be much more tedious than Merival, Arielle, Marion, Maiworm, Ritter, and Newfeldt here manage to be. This is a pity, for the scheme of the hook is a promising one. and Mr. Masters’s desire to dramatize some of the personal tragedies typical of American life is a credit to him; but the literary hell is notoriously paved with promising schemes and creditable desires.

Compared with any of these Other volumes, The Heart’s Journey,a collection by Siegfried Sassoon, is modest in intention and rather slight in performance. The angry vehemence of Mr. Sassoon’s very famous war poems, and the impatience of his satirical verse, are probably the strings he smites with the greatest spontaneity: and two or three poems in this volume— To One in Prison,’ ‘To One Who Was with Me in the War,’ and ’On Passing the New Menin Gate’ - are reminders, though not very notable ones, ot that earlier mood. What is new here is a strain of religious feeling — one can almost call it ecstasy — against the background of which the anger and the impatience have a different stress. A poem entitled ‘At the Grave of Henry Vaughan’ gives us the clue to the special ‘inspiration’ of these poems. Like Elinor Wylie, Mr. Sassoon is conscious of affiliations with the seventeenth century; but it is Vaughan, in point of fact, and not Donne, of whom we are reminded by the best half-dozen poems in his book. ‘ All-Soul’s Day and ‘A Last Judgment’ have much of the excited solemnity one associates with the author of Siler Scintiltans. If Mr. Sassoon goes on in this vein, he may prove to be a religious poet of a type not common in our day.

A still more deliberate archaism is achieved by John Finley, Jr., in his first volume, Thalia, or a Country Day.‘A masque’ is the title Mr. Finley gives his poem, but there is some pleasantry in tiie description; and as we read Thalia we are likely to think not so much of Ben Jenson as of Theocritus, or of I Midsummer Night’s Dream, or to leap another gap! — of those dramatic poems in which Mr. Lasoelles Abercrombie manages so singular a combination of the humorous and the metaphysical. Humor of a kind at once rustic and learned, at once ‘modern’ anti Arcadian, is certainly an effect of Mr. Finley’s masque; and if the metaphysics is not very clear, or perhaps very important, it is present as a sort of seasoning throughout. In any event, Thalia will make its appeal — to an audience probably more limited than one could wish — not by virtue of any intellectual element, but by virtue of a pastoral tonality that for all its reminiscences is curiously fresh, and a delicate artificiality of verse and diction that represent something more than literary sensitiveness. Air. Finley’s future verse may well have less the air of conscious craftsmanship than this: if it grows naturally from this beginning, it will prove, what Thalia leads one to suspect, that a genuinely individual talent has appeared.
NEWTON ARVIN

Angels and Earthly Creatures, by Elinor Wylie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1929. $2.50.

Cavender’s House, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: Macmillan Co. 1929. $2.00.

The Fate of the Jury: An Epilogue to Domesday Book, by Edgar Lee Masters. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1929. $2.50.

The Heart’s Journey, by Siegfried Sassoon. New York: Harper & Bros. 1929. $2.00.

Thalia, or a Country Day: A Masque, by John Finley, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1929. $2.00.