Poems, 1930-1940

THE poets of the last ten years can be roughly divided into those who have continued to use their own conscious and subconscious experience as the focus for their vision, and to specialize in experimental verse forms, and those who have objectified their art for propaganda purposes. These selections from the poems of Horace Gregory reveal a poet who does neither: a poet who is at once a meticulous artist, a man knowing the secrets of that ‘small room where the body moves alone,’ and one of those ‘to whom the miseries of the world are miseries and will not let them rest.’ Gregory can be a poet of pure song, —

but in his dramatic monologues, while never stepping out of the framework of poetic vision, he is a man sensitively and actively alive in the world of today. What Kenneth Fearing does in a much cruder and more limited and more external form, Gregory does subtly and inwardly, giving the voice and shape of poetry to the conflicts and confusions of ‘mean streets’ and the human souls who live there. His Mr. M’Phail — an older, seedier, and boozier Mr. Prufrock, compensating his material and spiritual failure with the pitiful splendor of neurotic daydreams — is a figure combining the keenest personal and the widest social implications. Gregory’s emotional range is perhaps the most comprehensive among modern poets, and as a craftsman in the movement and texture of words he is equally varied, commanding a precision of phrase and purity of line which can evoke effects of concentrated and sinewy intensity, of emotional warmth and vigor, and of disciplined, formal grace. E. D.