Modern Poets
Amaranth (Macmillan, $2.00) is an odd, wry, surprising book, a decided break with the series of desiccated narratives which Edwin Arlington Robinson has recently been producing. It had begun to seem that Mr. Robinson would go on indefinitely cutting off each year another length of the same stuff, stamped by a die of much the same design, and varying only the incidentals of the pattern. This reviewer has been guilty of saying as much in these very columns. But I ask leave to make a retractation in favor of Amaranth, which proves that Mr. Robinson can still defeat expectation. It is one of the most striking and original volumes of his long career.
Amaranth is a poem about misfits, especially those misfits who suffer delusions of genius. The main personages have manifestly been called by nature to lives of honest mediocrity. Rejecting their true vocation, they have made a delusive sacrifice of the ordinary sober marriages and businesses in which they ought to be engaged in favor of the arts and the professions, — the church, the law, invention, poetry, painting, music, fiction, — in which they are doomed to be botchers, living in uneasy vanity and worm-eaten assurance. Worse, they are exposed to the terrible experience of self-recognition in its most acute form. This they find by looking in the eyes of Amaranth, ‘the flower that never fades, one of Mr. Robinson’s wryest and strangest characters. Amaranth has the unhappy gift, merely by a candid and dispassionate gaze, of teaching failure to know itself. Not with voluntary malice, yet with a gloating sense of fatality, he allows each victim not already disillusioned to look him full in the eye. The results are a mocktragic climax which Mr. Robinson brings off by pure literary dexterity. The poet bangs himself, the painter stabs himself, the lady novelist simply collapses into extinction.
The world of the poem is a world of moral realities, and the physical realities, if so they may be called, are simply expressive symbols of the moral. The laws of place, time, and locomotion are transcended. And this transcendental world which Mr. Robinson evokes is perfectly and ingeniously adapted to the mood of the work. The lady novelist, suddenly revealed to herself in the full light of her emptiness by her look into the eyes of Amaranth, turns into a pinch of dust on the floor, which her pseudo-lover the musician gravely scrapes together and gathers into an envelope for remembrance. The ship in which the old inventor and his crazy companions embark in their attempt to escape from wrecked lives is a strikingly apt symbol of the flight from one delusion to another.
The feelings which are the subject of such a book, and to which it must give rise in the reader, are unhappy, even miserable. Mr. Robinson seasons them and makes them palatable by his irony, his quaint imaginations and acidulous humor. And in the end all turns out to be well for the hero, a quondam artist turned pump manufacturer, who has strength enough to escape once and for all from the false world of the artistic botchers, after an ill-advised return to it. The light which always breaks upon Mr. Robinson’s concluding pages breaks upon Fargo, who at last eludes the eyes of Amaranth forever.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s latest volume, Wine from These Grapes (Harpers, $2.00), represents the established qualities of her poetry at their best level without adding any fresh or unexpected turn of idea or method. The book is a brief collection of lyrics, including a sequence of sonnets. It is in every way an example of the author’s excellent gifts of style: her taste and resourcefulness in the application of language to her themes, her propriety of epithet and force of descriptive phrase, her imaginativeness and ingenuity in figures, her metrical proficiency and harmony. Miss Millay can also bring to the expression of familiar ideas and feelings that incidental perceptiveness and that ability to find new minor turns and fables of thought and fancy which form so much of the body of true poetry. Thus the new turn which she gives to the feelings of those who detest the idea of war, in her poem ‘ Conscientious Objector, is of the utmost felicity. Certainly it does not require as many sonnets as Miss Millay has written in her sequence ‘Epitaph for the Race of Man’ to tell us that no external disasters, but the betrayal of men by each other threatens to bring the species to a wretched end. But the appropriateness and the fine ingenuity of the minor and incidental thoughts and figures in the sequence will make it welcome to any reader who values mature reflection conjoined with poetry. Miss Millay is an example of the poet as artist. Sometimes she touches the hem of great poetry by uniting seriousness with perfect grace; but often her words do not seem to spring directly from intense inner fusion of the self and the object to be communicated. Rather it seems that, having felt sincerely and imagined poetically, she applies a fine resourcefulness and taste in language and a fine harmony of ear to the fitting embodiment of her perceptions. The result is a sense of perfection in the mode and hollowness in the substance; but the example of such an accomplished artist in American poetry should be more heeded by young novices.
Leonard Bacon stands outside his theme in a somewhat different fashion, and with results more obviously detrimental. His best gifts have hitherto revealed themselves in satire, which he has written for the most part in the stanza and with the mannerisms made famous by Lord Byron. This manner served him successfully enough in The Furioso, a destructive poem on the life of D’Annunzio; it serves him much less appropriately in Dream and Action (Harpers, $2.00), a more reverent account of the French poet Rimbaud. The confusion of dream and action in the mind of a sensitive human being is certainly a fit theme for poetry, but one which peculiarly demands that the reader shall he admitted into the true inwardness of the character. Mr. Bacon’s gift is rather for lively narrative and external portraiture, with penetrating satirical reflections. Rimbaud, in the last two divisions of the poem, is seen only through the eyes of two other men, and these observers are not well adapted to understand or to represent him sympathetically. The result is not a poem of great impressiveness; but what mature judgment and an aptitude well applied to the making of verse can do, without an inspired fusion of subject and method, Mr. Bacon does.
One of the most promising first volumes of poems which I have seen for some time is that bearing the title Permit Me Voyage, by James Agee (Yale University Press, $2.00). It is a volume of more art than matter; but the art represents the scrupulous and gifted apprenticeship of a beginning poet to the methods and forms of his chosen work, and it is the kind of art which is itself a promise of fine matter to come.
And some of the poems are themselves achievements of no small excellence. I do not care for the sort of litany which Mr. Agee entitles ‘Dedication.’ Its personal allusions I find embarrassing and its whole substance of private rather than public value; but bis elegy for a child is lyric of surprising tenderness, his ’Chorale’ a religious poem of surprising dignity, sincere feeling, and strong music. A longer poem, ‘Ann Garner,’ may be called the fertility piece of the volume. The woman mystically identified with the fertility of nature and the soil is a not unfamiliar figure in current literature; Mr. Agee shows at least in his ‘Ann Garner’ an unusual command of the mature freedoms of blank verse and an unmistakable force of imagination. His ‘Epithalamium’ is very pleasantly filled with echoes and strains of the past; it too is a fine piece of harmony, and of beauty of expression within the familiar style of English poetry as it has come down from the Renaissance. Mr. Agee’s reception should be one of sincere congratulation and lively expectancy.
THEODORE MORRISON