Contemporary Poets

by HOWARD NEMEROV

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POETS in their first volumes seem sometimes able to do everything, whether or not they do it well; the style they have not formed has not begun to threaten them with penalties for desertion. Older poets can no longer do everything, and must settle for something; since this decision is as serious in poetry as it is elsewhere, we must admire their courage whether we like the something or not. In the following comments I have arbitrarily brought together the work of new poets, semi-established poets, and veterans in the field. I do not find that any generality will hold for all or even most of the poets, except the negative one, perhaps, that there is at present very little agreement about the nature of style in poet ry.

Among the four new poets whose first books have been published over the last year or so I would characterize Various Jangling Keys by Edgar Bogardus, volume 50 of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (Yale University Press, $2.50), as a witty and elegant work. W. H. Auden in his Foreword quotes what is very likely the best stanza in the book, the second half of “In Memory of Robert Menner,” and I think I cannot do better than agree by giving it here: —

Quite apart from the scrupulous fairness of the feeling, how good it is! And with what steadiness and authority it moves, particularly by means of the rove-over lines which, with their balanced hesitations, imitate in the voice the tensions of the judgment. These small marvels of harmony do not happen often, but they are more the mark of a talent for poetry than any violence of feeling or single brilliant trope.

Daniel G. Hoffman’s An Armada of Thirty Whales, volume 51 of the Yale Series (Yale University Press, $2.50), is probably the most openly sentimental of these four volumes by new poets— a slip of the irony discloses, as in part 2 of his “Ode,” something not unlike T. E. Brown. Mr. Hoffman’s poetry is extremely detailed in its observation of nature, and his clams and snails and pears and whales yield intricate parables by being so closely inspected. Perhaps not sentimentality so much as a diffidence about it, or fear of it, weakens so many of these poems just at the ending; his “Icarus, Icarus” moves with a goodly competence down to “what ecstasy of pride it was that shook / you loose from all that beeswax and those quills, / O how you soared,” then drags in what I feel to be a plain irrelevance: “that instant before Breughel / showed human eyes unseeing at your fall.” This or a similar fault diminished my pleasure in several other poems also, but I found one, “That the pear delights me now,” whose ritual nature allows of a quiet, anticipated close, and which seems strong and fine throughout.

The poems of Harvey Shapiro (The Eye, Alan Swallow, $2.00) do not seem to me for the most part either very finished or successful; what is interesting, though, about these evidently literate (and literary) productions is that the things I most dislike in them clearly result from purpose, not accident. The carelessness, the metrical eccentricity, the lines which won’t stand up, the flatness at the finish, frequently running into irrelevance or into the stock figure of the poet standing there with his mouth open (“I sing to myself in this stone weather”)—these things all strike me as more like courtly disdain than incompetence, though I don’t dislike them the less on that account. I would admire the attempt, as I take it, to find some metrical balance which shall not be the metrical balance of ten million other poems — except for the fact that in so many of these poems there is no balance at all. The poet has sacrificed the chance of easy effects but has not been able to make hard ones, and his rhythms are left weak and wandering — for example, “In these our wormwood madrigals, / A shower of birds down / Unstrung trees wheel / To the close of the final day.”True that the rhythmic dispositions of much poetry, being forced on it by metrical demands, become common and useless; but to throw out meter and work on cadence alone does not seem to be the solution for Shapiro, whose delicate voice rather fails to fill the formal demand than bursts through it by excess of energy.

Of the four new poets, Peter Kane Dufault seems the least trammeled, probably also the most ambitious. His book, Angel of Accidence (Macmillan, $3.25), is technically not less studied than the others, but through it all he gets a certain large freedom and violence of voice which is capable of more varied tones and which they don’t have. The result is not always a joy forever; as he takes more chances than the others he has more lapses, and his longer poems especially, where he leaves his birds, beasts, fish, insects, trees, and goes to political reflection and a kind of blatant satire, are not very engaging. He seems there to throw a way all the skill he exhibits in more compact and personal work. Probably also this volume should have been more rigorously selected. His best, though, can be very fine, as in this figure of the trucks on the Post Road at night: “like asteroids flung from those nebulae, / the neoned cities of the east, across our intervening voids.”And in at least one poem, “Apostasy,”everything works together to achieve the right and absolute result :—

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MAY SARTON’S fourth book of verse, The Land of Silence (Rinehart, $2.50), at first looks very fine, but a close reading is a disappointment. Either there is mere flatness where triumph is intended — This living colonnade / Where form and content are / Not parted any longer!" —or, alternatively, some violent feeling, expressed for its own sake, is forced on the poem, as in “ The Caged Bird,”where the speaker responds to the bird’s terror of approaching night with “And naked now as God, / I wept hot tears of blood" — two lines which have vastly puzzled my literal head.

It would be wrong to suppose a want of technical skill, or to assume that that alone was responsible; Miss Sarton can versify handsomely enough, and bring things to a happy finish where the necessity of “ passion “ does not prohibit sense— for example, “Our last courage has been subtly shaken: When the cat dies, we are overtaken.” But most of these poems are marred by a false concept of poetry as a free excitement unattached to the hardness of things, an eleutheromania: “ That beautiful mad exploration / Through a multiple legend of landscape.”One legend at a time, we feel, would be preferable. And when, at the height, she says, “I stand, rapt with delight, though deaf and blind, / And speak my poem,”it is difficult not to agree that this or something like this is exactly the trouble.

Richard Eberhart’s latest book, too, is somewhat disappointing, perhaps because the Selected Poems warranted such high expectations. Underctiff, Poems 1946-1953 (Oxford University Press, $4.00), though it has good things, is characterized chiefly by somewhat meandering reflection and reminiscence, as of a poet who at this moment does not happen to be writing poetry: —

Each argument begets its counterpart,
Only in opposites the truth is human,
Intelligible, the shoemaker Boehme said.
I recall a steamer on the Pearl River
Slipping out from teeming Canton. . . .

Now this kind of thing exhibits, I suppose, the base from which Eberhart’s best poetry also springs: his moralizing eloquence, rude, cheerful, strong, with now and then a sound of Langland and something of that temper, rises quite simply from talk; but when it fails to rise we have, instead of a poem, the substance of the thought, a few images, and those sententiae which are the by-product of moral poetry when it succeeds and its stock in trade when it fails. This book has sententiae in great numbers: “Each age deserves the art it gets.”“And what is the whole of life But a drowning in the act of swimming?" “knowledge is not something stated, / But a red dream.”Yet Eberhart is a good poet, and though so much of this book is but “something stated,”there are exceptions, among which I would particularly mention “Choosing a Monument,”a colloquy in which the dramatic situation commands relevance and, despite our being bludgeoned now and then with “symbolism” — “This is the deathwish / Of our civilization right in our family” — we feel something of the mild strength and eccentric magnificence we are accustomed to associate with this poet and moralist.

Howard Moss’s The Toy Fair (Scribner’s, $2.50) is surely one of the most accomplished collections of lyric poetry to appear since the war. It is very rare that a poet, while still young, knows his trade so well and makes his verse with such firmness and freedom as Moss does. The true distinction of his poetry, because it is first a distinction of technical ability, reveals itself slowly. It must be listened to for its physical character as well as read on the page for its sinewy flowing of figure and intellectual control. His way with the art has a geniality and ease in which form’s limitation appears as possibility. The air of fresh life in these poems is there, so far as such things have to do with technique, because the poet’s ear has made the nicest adjustment of cadence to meter and meter to cadence. Because he understands phrasing, his labor is felt by the reader as freedom.

The subjects, themes, attitudes of these poems are sad, refined, fastidious to the point of aristocracy— “Exquisite emphases and subtle losses / Make up their tide,” as he says in another connection; to the point, sometimes, of a morbid and perverse aristocracy, feeling “The swank and stink of the imagination / Beautifully gone bad.”But it is after all only the materials which are sad, and these are not the poetry. The poetry takes these things, subject, theme, attitude, in hand and makes of them, in the beautiful best of these poems — “The View Minus One,” “Burning Love Letters,” “Elegy for My Father,” “Animal Hospital.” and “Venice” — a Mozartian elegance and gaiety.

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FINALLY we come to longer, more ambitious works by two poets, Robinson Jeffers and Robert Penn Warren, who are committed not only to their characteristic styles but also to characteristic subject matter and theme. This last, in the present works of both poets, is strikingly similar: the workings in the world of nemesis and dike, tragedy. Jeffers applies directly to the Greeks for his stories; Warren tends to find his Greeks in the early history and historic legend of our own Republic.

Robinson Jeffers’ Hungerfield and Other Poems (Random House, $3.00) consists of the title poem, a narrative, as told by a man mourning his wife, “of Hungerfield, the man at Horse Creek, / Who fought with Death,” which seems to draw somewhat on the drunken Heracles who appears in the ending of Alcestis; a play, “The Cretan Woman.” based on Euripedes’ Hippolytus; and a number of shorter poems. Of all this, “ Hungerfield ” itself is the least interesting part, being marred by Jeffers’ characteristic carelessness about the motive of action, which allows the subordinate episodes only the spectacular value that they would have in a movie of violence; when it comes to their consequences they must be either retracted or disregarded. But in “The Cretan Woman,” where he can take his action from Euripedes’ play — which he modifies chiefly, so far as I recall it, in making Hippolytus’ ending less magical and more plausible—Jeffers is free to attend to the presentation of effects already legitimated by a coherent action; and I found this play very moving and skillfully told. It would go very well on the stage. The only difficulty seems to be that the convention of poetic speech will not hold up for the more problematic aspects of character. For example, where the epicene nature of Hippolytus has to be dealt with, the lines relapse into the pseudo-brutality of detective story talk. I wish, too, that the blatantly unnecessary “message for today ” could be left out of Aphrodite’s final speech.

Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons (Random House, $3.50), “A Tale in Verse and Voices,” is not a play, according to the poet, but “a dialogue spoken by characters,” who discuss their action with each other and the author in a limbo of place and time like that Judgment Day which Kafka said was not a day but a summary court in perpetual session. This action concerns Lilburn Lewis, who one day in 1811, with his brother Isham, chopped in pieces a Negro slave: “Just an episode in the long drift of the human / Narrative, and impressive chiefly for / Its senselessness.”The episode gains historical consequence, symbolically at least, from the circumstance that Lilburn was a nephew of Thomas Jefferson (who also plays a part), so that the theme, like that of Warren’s novels, poses the violent evil of “ the blood ” against rational enlightenment and progress.

It is a powerful piece of work, long, elaborate, rhapsodical, and digressive —spoiled at places by the appearance of so many typical Warren lines which have the vice of generating a great show of violence whether anything is happening or not and a pleasure to read even if one must conclude that the case is not fully proved. It is not a play not only by reason of its form, but also because Jefferson’s moral connection with the affair is tenuous and indirect; Meriwether Lewis is brought in to accuse him closer to home, to make us feel that the aggrandizement of the Republic, for which he was responsible, was much of a piece with Lilburn’s act, for which he was not responsible. But in some sense, though the parable is there, the action remains symbolic rather than virtual, weakened precisely by the absence of the dramatic element which the author has explicitly disclaimed. This is perhaps an unfair charge, yet it is one way of accounting for a deficiency I felt in reading this poem which otherwise is powerful, coherent, and moving.