THE NEWEST POETRY

...other poems rely upon seasonal changes of landscape or are shrewdly and often beautifully apt analyses of family...

...No better poetry is being written than in America...

...It seems rather forced and not at all what the literary scene needs— or at least not all it needs...

...What Stevens chiefly did for our recent poets was to give a systematic frame to their individual, small observations...

...second, an interest in the metaphysical poetry of Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and other English poets of the Seventeenth Century...

...We have as one result poetry speculating upon the character, value, nature of the imagination...

...The Newest Poetry by FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN JOHN HALL WHEELOCK, introducing the fourth volume of Poets Today (Scribner's), makes an observation of a kind that has become customary in recent criticism...

...This is almost too neat...

...no poets are more thoroughly trained, more thoroughly given to exercises of technical skill...

...Coming at life in that way, Stevens could reach into major themes of the modern mind, without convicting himself of easy or over-simple ways of explaining it...

...The limits of this poetry meet one on almost every page...

...Just what all of this will add up to, or where it will lead to, it is hard to say...

...Miss Moore largely suggests, in the manner of a serious though witty conversationalist...

...It seems to have taken for granted that "all things new" have long since been finally stated and that what remains is only to present small variations of experiences and meaning...

...Instead of encouraging poetry to be bolder, this condition makes it more ingenious and more competent in statement...

...It is lyrical and mild, playing upon time-honored rhythms and expressions...

...they are vigorous West as opposed to "effete East," and they have taken to themselves all new and off-center and "un-respectable" elements in the culture: jazz, the hipster, Skid Row, the hot rod—anything that still survives the cliches of the stammering scholar or the man in the gray flannel suit...

...It began as a generally agreed revolt against the emotional excesses and the inadequacies of technique of our recent past...

...This conviction, so long a part of our poetry that it is hard for us to appreciate a poetry (like that of Edwin Arlington Robinson, for example) that is not a result of it, had as its Principal sponsors William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore...

...Richmond Lattimore (Poems, University of Michigan Press) has similar gifts, his concern with classical languages being even more demonstrable than Fitzgerald's...

...We have an abundance of illustrations of their influence, but Miss Moore's effect is especially felt...

...We communicate, apparently, not in abstractions but in concrete instances...

...As for T. S. Eliot, he seems to "have finished" his career as poet, and now looks back upon it in critical retrospect...

...On Poetry and Poets, unlike the frequent appearances of Pound on the printed page, belongs to the history of our poetry instead of being a look into its present or future prospects...

...Ideas are not supposed to speak for themselves...

...He does of course speak out concerning the ambiguities and the horror of our life: Overhead in the deep sky Of May Day jet bombers cut long White slashes of smoke...

...The human is represented as like the thing, or a situation that is non-human is obviously used to suggest its human implications...

...Less convincing is Miss Moore's relation to such a young poet as Adrienne Cecile Rich (The Diamond Cutters, Harper's, 1955), who seems to have shrewdly assumed a wisdom that recalls Robert Frost occasionally (see "Autumn Equinox") but is mostly in her own mode...

...This condition of settled and discreet and erudite annotation is true of the majority of our poets...

...I think the attitude of the "beat generation" suggests a wider gap between accepted poetic virtues and "life" than actually obtains...

...The details of this critical battle against the Nineteenth Century are too complex for a brief introduction such as this, but I should like to suggest two important tendencies which came from it: first, the respect for "the poetic object," with it a firm belief in what was usually called "poetic knowledge...

...Not even T. S. Eliot inspires such dedicated attention to his poetry as Pound encourages in a fairly small but wholly absorbed and confirmed group of exegetes...

...and this is by all odds the exception to prove the rule...

...It follows along simple lines of argumentation: it is customary either to be wholesomely conformist or timidly ironic in poetry, these poets seem to say...

...He has called them the "beat generation" (to distinguish them, apparently, from the "lost generation" of an earlier decade...

...We have come a long way from the early years of the century, when "new poetry" and "new criticism" were twin surprises in the literary scene...

...Suffice it to say that they have led to a poetry that is above all neat, sharply correct, formally exact, and concerned largely with a discreet extension of the virtues residing in "things"—that is, things "of this world" as they enter the human orbit and are qualified in their roles in human situations...

...Beyond this minimum of poetic statement, poems become more complex as poets (of equal sensitivity) know more—facts, literature, languages—or know them differently...

...How much these two interests have affected the poetry now being written it would take many pages fully to explain...

...Robert Fitzgerald (In the Rose of Time, New Directions, 1956) has a genuine lyric gift, a fine sense of the image, a mastery of languages, and a true sense of form...

...In these poems (as in those of many of her contemporaries) one sees the doctrine of things and the interest in the metaphysical conceit come together, rather quietly and unpretentiously...

...or they speak in this "metaphysical" manner of migrating robins who have eaten his Christmas berries: . . . the symbols Of incarnate flesh we tended All year will be flying, mingled With pale hot bird blood, high over The barren Mexican mountains...

...But the divergence continues to exist—as though in the 1950s we cannot have anything but "specialists," including specialists of sensitivity...

...When he died at the age of 75 his newly published Collected Poems stood as a monument to a lifetime's work of defining and clarifying the role of the imagination...

...There are the usual pieces that their author rightly kept out of Collected Poetry, but there are also many that are happily brought to print in spite of his reservations about them...

...Under the Welcome sign, Under the Rotary emblem On the highway in the suburbs, His body lies under the hurling stones...

...There is some daring as well, but this is largely true of the older, established poets, those who indeed were largely responsible for the initial steps taken in the new poetry...

...they are merely studied...

...Sometimes this "scholar's concern" can lead to significant forms of muted emotion—as in Lattimore's series of poems called "Sonnets from the Encyclopedia Britannica...

...While Eliot may be said beyond all doubt to have had the most pervasive influence upon modern poetry (only a small dissident group disdains this influence), the nature of that influence has long since been settled, and it is now so much a part of our poetry as to appear almost "institutional" rather than personal...

...The second issue of the Evergreen Review (Grove Press) gives them a full display, with Rexroth acting as master of the unceremonious...

...But it is not bold, forthright, or startling...

...Section Rock-Drill (New Directions, 1956) brings them to number 95, and there is still no real notion regarding the total number they will eventually have...

...This tendency, to offer however limited a rationale of poetry within the poem itself, comes originally from the circumstances of the "new poetry" when (1910 to 1925, say) poets self-consciously felt they were doing something new (or reasserting something old but neglected) and said that something new in their poems...

...Strangely, Rexroth's own poetry does not ordinarily testify at all to this raucous spirit...

...S3 To take up the suggestion that the newest poetry is concerned with the discretion of things: this concern has many sources, not the least of which is the general distrust of ideas and the embarrassment felt about overt philosophizing in literature...

...Ezra Pound, whose criticism from 1912 to 1930 was more responsible than any other for major changes in literary attitudes, moves closer to his final achievement, the completion of the Cantos...

...he has survived the eclipses of many poets who years ago seemed as great as he or even more promising...

...The imagination is judged in his poems as in the act of functioning in the world and in the mind of man...

...There is a vocal minority in our literature, concentrated for the most part in and about San Francisco and informally "led" by Kenneth Rex-roth...

...His latest volume, On Poetry and Poets (Farrar, Straus, Cudahy), contains essays that go back to the middle 1930s and bring the record to 1956...

...It is adaptation, imitation, or perhaps containment of originality within the modes of writing discoverable in the past...

...The solution is not to write an "anti-poetry," which is what Ginsberg's howling amounts to, but rather to put the very fine poetic sensitivity of our times to a wider range of application: perhaps to suggest more daring, to extend the base of our thinking in images or in metaphors...

...The recent Opus Posthumous (Knopf), edited very well by Samuel French Morse, simply strengthens that impression...

...These poets may find it unwise to discuss Plato, Marx, or Lenin in their poems, or to speak of man in too simple a world of categories, but they are not similarly timid in the matter of discussing the aesthetic life itself...

...Exhibit A of the crowd is Allen Ginsberg, who came originally from William Carlos Williams' Paterson, New Jersey, but is now safely unsafe in Henry Miller's West...

...Swinburne, such great sponsors of poetic statement as Tennyson and Longfellow, were the objects of scorn, but more than this, the lines were tightly drawn between what most young critics called "Romanticism" and what they hoped would be a "new Classicism...

...I think that I've said enough about the character of our recent poetry to suggest its virtues and its limitations...

...The ideas of her poems are so simple as to seem trite, except that they are stated with a slight suggestion of originality and are thus preserved as "something new...

...While I have perhaps been overemphasizing the discretion of this poetry (there are many more examples of it), its show of constraint and its shying away from overt demonstrations of feeling, there is one aspect of it that needs yet to be discussed...

...The poem "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is a more biter, a more vociferous, and a more competent "howl" than Gingsberg's: "They are murdering all the young men," he begins, and then proceeds, along lines of a modified 1920s rebellion against the class in power: They are stoning Stephen, They are casting him forth from every city in the world...

...In Defense of The Earth (New Directions, 1956) is different from the poetry I have earlier discussed only in range and ; means of subtlety...

...I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked," he'begins, and proceeds to explain how and1 why...

...He is news, controversy, a focus and center...

...There are many dangers in the suggestion that they should speak to "larger audiences...

...Once, and only once, does Rexroth prove himself a member of the "beat" crowd...

...images are supposed to speak for them...

...Above all, however exasperatingly opaque the Cantos} may seem to the uninitiated, Pound as poet can offer some kind of inspiration to almost all young poets...

...The blackbird Sings and the baby laughs, midway In the century of horror...

...The poetry and prose of Opus Posthumous go back to Stevens' beginnings and extend to a point a few weeks before his death...

...It is nevertheless true that poetry is little read except by poets or by captive readers in college courses...

...perhaps Randall Jar-rell, who has certainly shown us how poems can be made from violence and pain...

...It is difficult always to specify her influence, but I think it possible that its most attractive results at present are Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Wilbur...

...The religious implications are obvious, as are the suggestions of D. H. Lawrence's older attack upon the destruction of Christian values...

...Yet it is a natural enough outburst of simplicity in the midst of so much timid subtlety...

...Ted Roethke, who is willing to take risks with his considerable gifts...

...she insists that her subjects have more than a literal meaning, but at best they substantiate a conviction (or a fear, or a suspicion) by means of innuendo and limited kinds of analogy...

...The latter's book, Things of This World (Har-court, Brace, 1956), testifies in its title and in any number of its poems to the qualities of quiet, often witty though always engagingly serious commentary and analogy...

...but they are, none of them, unexpected, and to any one who has followed Eliot closely they seem to conclude a career rather than to suggest any new directions in it...

...There are poets who already attend to this: Robert Penn Warren, whose Promises (Random House) marks his return to poetry after years devoted to the writing of novels...

...They study him, in spite of his meanderings, for the fascination of a "scheme" that usually remains im- , plicit but often reveals itself as explicitly as anyone could wish...

...at least the demand upon audiences should be equally great, as our critics ceaselessly assert...

...Looking more closely at the poems most representative of the period, one becomes aware of how large an extent perception has taken the place of emotion, how much exact observation and description there is and how little of the search for meaning . . ." This is now an almost common complaint: the new poets are competent, accurate, ingenious in their maneuvering with words and multiple meaning, unsentimental, and in the end limited and entirely without the imaginative daring necessary to make them more than merely interesting...

...His major work is called Howl (City Lights Pocket Bookshop) and features in its title poem the rhythms of a hipster Whitman: angry, violent, obscene, untutored...

...It seems often on the threshold of greatness, and occasionally (as in John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (Farrar, Straus, and Cuda-hy, 1956) appears to have achieved it...

...In some ways this judgment of our "newest poetry" is not unfair...

...Whatever else we may say about them, we can definitely assert that our recent poets have proved masters of technique, and that our recent novelists have decidedly failed so to prove themselves...

...The power of words relates to the things they stand for, and expression is an arrangement of things and images which "talk to each other...

...Therefore, let us be stridently vindictive and unsubtly obscene...

...In this area of critical work, Wallace Stevens was preeminent...

...The Cantos are not imitated (they are really inimitable...

...She has above all affected the present interest in the discreet and limited poem neatly and wittily done in narrow focus and with limited though undoubted meaning...

...The world of Miss Moore's "things" allows for a wide range of erudition, knowledge of minutiae, application of scholarly fragments to poetic treatment...