Some Recent Poetry
BY PETER DAVISON
THEODORE ROETHKE’S COLLECTED POEMS (Doubleday, $5.95) constitutes the most powerful body of work yet published by any American born in this century. The poems move from conventional rhymes in his earliest work toward an astonishing identification with the natural world, and from there into the poetic discovery of love. Ultimately, in his greatest poems, he rose into an incandescent mysticism like Blake’s. These were published posthumously and are brought together here with his earlier work for the first time. Roethke, who died in 1963, grew unevenly, like a tree, through drought and kindly weather. His poems belong in the library of anyone serious about modern poetry, along with the other unquenchable lyricist of our time, his friend Dylan Thomas.
ANTIWORLDS by the young Russian poet ANDREI VOSNESENSKY (Basic Books, S4.95) is a selection translated by a group of distinguished American poets beaded by W. H. Auden and Stanley Kunitz. Its publication is probably the most exciting event of the year in poetry. Vosnesensky’s spaciousness, his assurance that he speaks for his fellowmen, his confidence in the centrality of poetry as “The Russian Art” make these poems powerful indeed; their concreteness and their humor are eminently translatable; their themes are ambitious; their utterances are memorable. They raise the haunting question: why has no American poet, with the single exception of Robert Frost, yet been able to elevate poetry into so central a place in his own scheme of things and in the imagination of his audience?
Vosnesensky is thirty-three; JOHN HALL WHEELOCK is eighty. His DEAR MEN AND WOMEN (Scribner’s, S3.50) is the latest book by this dean of American poets, whose first was published fifty-five years ago; it is also his finest. These elegiac sonnets, celebrations, reflections, and a few parodies glimmer with fully ruminated and comprehended experience. Even more striking than their bleached wisdom is their daring: their utter simplicity of form and statement. Pure pleasure to read; a rare achievement to have written.
Two younger American poets are particularly worthy of notice. DONALD FINKEL’S third collection, A JOYFUL NOISE (Atheneum, S4.50 and S$1.95), displays a calm confidence of form and a colloquial lucidity in his best poems, about which he says, “I try to imagine the poem aspiring/to the humility/of prose, the poem saintly enough to be content/to call attention to something beyond himself. . . .” Finkel is witty at best, at worst a wiseacre, but his poems about poetry are especially fascinating.
ARTHUR FREEMAN’S second book, ESTRANGEMENTS (Harcourt, Brace & World, $3.95), is remarkably all of a piece. His adept, diffident poems display competence in a wide variety of traditional verse forms, as well as in free verse, but they are sometimes a little neat, a little pat; and although none of these poems ever betrays the central impulse that gave it birth (a rare thing to be able to say about poetry), they dare too little. Witty, discriminating, sometimes brilliant (see “Song After a Bad Night”), these poems tend also to play it safe.
WILLIAM JAY SMITH, of an older generation, has been established in reputation for some years past. In his fourth collection, THE TIN CAN (Delacorte, $4.00, a Seymour Lawrence Book), he seems to be breaking out into a fresh and bubbling watercourse of free verse. He has for the most part given up the cramped and tidy metrics that characterized his early verse and turned to a long Whitmanesque (sometimes Swinburnian) rhythm that enables him to build poems by accretion and gathering rather than by emphasis. It is a great step forward, but the book contains a number of poems in Smith’s old style that suffer by comparison with the new.
ROBERT PENN WARREN, far more profound than Stephen Vincent Benet, is our likeliest writer of epic poetry, as witness his superb long poem Brother to Dragons. The narrative instinct shows itself in all the finest poems of his career, while his lyrics by contrast often sound windy and portentous. His SELECTED POEMS: NEW & OLD, 1923-1966 (Random House, $7.95) is an important and puzzling collection.