The Burning Mountain
$2.7.5
DUTTON
THIS is a collection of twenty-four poems in free verse and rhymed quartets written between 1933 and 1943. The material is largely regional and pastoral — the Ozarks, the deserts of the Southwest, New England woods after the hurricane — and the style is reminiscent of both Frost and Whitman. The later poems are warconscious and contrast the virtues of nature with the malevolence of humanity. Didactic and moralistic, yet these later poems leave the reader in doubt as to what the poet believes in and wants beyond a shadowy sort of pantheism.
The jacket blurb comes unfortunately close to imitating Mr. Fletcher’s own style when it says that his “true métier is America — interior, inland United States, the land itself, the feel and meaning of it, the pioneering spirit. ” Mr, Fletcher’s language has the same groping, imprecise quality, as though his subjects, after all, are too big and dynamic to be written about in precise, integrated imagery. The style of Whitman’s lesser poems is suggested by such a passage as the following, from “Ode to New York": —
Steel, smelted out of rock,
Rock, rivetted to steel;
Out of the grind of sullen glaciers, the spark, the sway, the shock
That builds more than thought could compass, heaps effort higher than we feel;
Out of the moan of forests dying, these huge aerial fires;
Out of the sea-mists sweeping inward, these jagged ranks of
towers;
Golden windows glowing like petals of strown flowers;
Out of the sand of sunbleached beaches, this hourglass running with unspent desires.
Rock, rivetted to steel;
Out of the grind of sullen glaciers, the spark, the sway, the shock
That builds more than thought could compass, heaps effort higher than we feel;
Out of the moan of forests dying, these huge aerial fires;
Out of the sea-mists sweeping inward, these jagged ranks of
towers;
Golden windows glowing like petals of strown flowers;
Out of the sand of sunbleached beaches, this hourglass running with unspent desires.
The similes are not related to each other, and their connotations are ignored, so that the verse is diffuse and inarticulate. Here, as elsewhere, a vague impression of power is achieved by an obvious use of vigorous words and alliteration.
One of the principles of the Imagists to which Mr. Fletcher subscribed in 1917 was that “we are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous.” The present volume does not uphold the standards of some of Mr. Fletcher’s earlier work, largely because he seems to have abandoned that principle.
GEORGE DE F. LORD, JR.