THIS is generally regarded as not one of the more favorable times for the publication of poetry, either from the publisher’s or from the poet’s point of view. But poetry continues to be published. It lives at both ends: witness a current ‘collected’ edition proffering the summed-up work of a lifetime, and a novice volume giving promise of new achievement.
Collected Poems, by Florence Converse (Dutton, $2.50), represents verses written during forty-five years, from 1892 until the present. It does not seem an affectation in Miss Converse, as it so often does in versewriters, to tag each poem with its date. What Miss Converse had to say about pacifism in ‘Far Horizons’ (1916), or about labor in ‘The Radical’ (1918), will command the respect of those who read with liberal sympathies and a sense of history; and the dates will strengthen this respect. What Miss Converse has to say in her best poems is more important than the poetry itself considered as expression; yet she is also a proficient worker in verse. She knows, for example, how to write a conversational or quasi-dramatic poem, as in ‘The Radical’ or ‘The Voices,’ an epitomized sketch of Joan of Arc, She knows that the sentences and clauses in such a poem must be brief, the interchange of statement and reply quick and unentangled; and she can meet these technical demands without loss to the versemedium. She writes also with a certain passionateness; when her theme is important and serious, the poem seldom lets it down. Some of the occasional pieces in the volume will have no value for the general reader; some of the travel sketches exhibit a kind of sprightliness which will not be to everyone’s taste. The religious poems most nearly approach lasting value, perhaps, most certainly combine poetry of expression with importance of theme. For Miss Converse is a spiritual poet in both a good and a bad sense: good, in so far as the spirit is a concern that life should justify itself to its own best conscience by integrity, justice, generosity, humility before the mystery of things; bad, in so far as the spiritual is the fleshless, the skimmed and cerebral. Each one of us, after all, is a biological centre of experience that comes to us quite physically, through organs; the poet is especially a creature of the senses. Miss Converse’s poems will seem to some readers to have no viscera. To sympathize with them fully, one must be not merely spiritual, but also a little rarefied.
John Hall Wheelock, in his Povuis, 1911-1936 (Scribners, $2.50), shows himself a devoted and sincere disciple of the art, but more notable for the sense of exaltation with which he writes than for his actual performance on the page. The difficulty is that lie seems to write from a fund of vague, expansive emotion; he never individualizes a character, never makes a scene stand out sharp and clear in its own precise details, and seldom succeeds in finding even an image which is distinct or definite. It will not suffice to excuse him on the ground that mystical ecstasy is beyoud expression, ineffable, incommunicable. This is the common report of mystics, it is true; but those of them who manage to impress their experience on others, even if they cannot divulge the heart of the mystery, at least trace the steps to it with sharpness and preciseness enough, and embroider the path with figures and images cut in clear and definite lines. Mr. Wheelock’s whole poetical stock seems to consist of rapturous but undifferentiated, unparticularized feeling; and as the emotion is undefined, so the expression is indistinct, putting up with all manner of phrases from the common sentimental store Mr. Wheelock writes essentially the same poem whether he calls it ‘Song from beyond Death’ or ‘Sunday in the Park.’ At times the genuineness of his emotion proves communicable, and then the reader comes on a passage in which a sense of exalted participation in the sum of things is truly given. This is Mr. Wheelook’s poetry at its best; at its all too frequent worst it is a poetry of pink mist.
THEODORE MORRISON