Poetry for the Springtime
WEBSTER, HARVEY CURTIS
Poetry for the Springtime By Harvey Curtis Webster Author of "On a Darkling Plain," a study of Thomas Hardy; Professor of English at Louisville University Since she was a public personality as...
...But if you are forced into it: remember that good and evil are as common as air, and like air shared "By the panting belligerents...
...He rages against the poets who have caught the prevalent fever, who "impressed by the 'laboratory' ? have forgot the flower...
...His last work, In Country Sleep, shows progress not only in his comprehension of his relation to the universe but also in his ability to phrase his seeing with a clarity that does not sacrifice vividness...
...Olson's book is his Aristotelian dogmatism and his frequently flat statements from the professional throne...
...Chicago...
...Probably my prosy arrangement sounds no more consistent than what I said about Millay, but those who know Jeffers's poems know that there is a consistent implicit metaphysic that includes these ideas underneath every one of his poems...
...140 pp...
...2 Hungerfield and Other Poems, By Robinson Jeffers...
...I wish I could quote the poem in its entirety, but perhaps this brief sampling indicates the high quality sometimes attained in a volume that is nearly a consistent pleasure to read...
...The Desert Music and Other Poems4 is so good that it could be reviewed adequately only by entire quotation...
...The United States is a perishing republic thickening into empire, and all "civilizations" shine to perish and lack the nobility one can find in the shore opposite humanity??in hawks and stones, which do not pretend to virtue but are mobile or immobile without affecting to be otherwise...
...And, though she has often displeased our most astute critics because her early promise has been fulfilled unevenly, since her death she has been praised by Edmund Wilson as a "master of human expression" and "spokesman for the human spirit...
...It is difficult "to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there...
...You will not find it there but in despised poems...
...In his latest volume, Hungerfield, what Jeffers has to say is shadowed and inspired by the death of his wife...
...But she has always been too ready to print poems with lines that are commonplace ("We were as close together as it is possible for two people to be") and has too infrequently brought her poems to a coincident climax of language and meaning, as Marianne Moore nearly always does, as Elinor Wylie more frequently did...
...By William Carlos Williams...
...What my delusions or illusions prompt me to prefer (and in prejudice begins the taste for poetry) I find more usually in the poems of Dylan Thomas than in those of Robinson Jeffers...
...Each of the few poems in his last volume are as near perfection as any poems can be...
...Picking at random, "To the Stonecutters," "Night," and "Shine, Perishing Republic" make eloquent partial sense which may seem wholly sensible in tomorrow's perhaps un-brave new world...
...As Elder Olson points out, Thomas was more Keats than Shakespeare, more lyrical than dramatic, more self-involved than humorous??and nevertheless one of the geniuses of our difficult times...
...3.25...
...Vincent Millay...
...His insight into what the poet tried to do and did (though I disagree with his evaluation of Thomas's performance) is the best I have seen...
...His convention is a pessimism that derives from, but cannot be blamed upon, Nietzsche and Freud...
...One also wishes that Millay had accepted or invented an integrating world-view such as Yeats, Eliot...
...Christian and democratic idealism rarely realizes in fact what it promises in hope...
...To an even greater degree than Thomas, whose life was tragically truncated, much more than Millay or Jeffers, possibly as much as Eliot, Yeats and Auden, Williams has matured consistently throughout his 71 years...
...Leave it for children, and the emotional rabble of the streets, to back their horse or support a brawler...
...Random House...
...Williams's latest wisdom-made poetry seems to me even more admirable than that which one finds in Paterson, surely one of the few great long poems in modern times...
...Even at her worst??in the volumes that came just before and during World War II??her motives were honorably those of an unusually sensitive person...
...Look at what passes for the new...
...Fifty or more of his shorter poems, which are vivid particulars embodying the whole of his thought, are as difficult as pain to forget...
...90 pp...
...Of course, it is impossible, as Mr...
...War is hell, but it ignites more nobility than the placid pursuit of comforting commodities...
...3.00...
...4 The Desert Music and Other Poems...
...This, in the age of cold crisis that may lead to war fought by H-bombs, is in a somewhat diminished degree the concern of all of us...
...Yet, this story of a man who defeats death and regrets it is his most vivid long poem for a long time...
...Of these three, Robinson Jeffers is the most conventional in his consistency even though his ideas are an affront to the public optimism of average readers...
...Considering her career as a whole and her last volume in particular, I believe Millay was more uniformly a spokesman for the human spirit than a master of human expression...
...Millay always has been...
...Thomas will be read even longer, for his peculiar vision presents eloquently an individual's emergence from a despair few men in few centuries are likely to find outmoded...
...Even in this last volume, which was written when her health was failing, there are fifteen very good poems and one that stands with her best: "Small hands, relinquish all: Nothing the fist can hold, ?? Not power, not love, not gold...
...Thomas apparently was always trying to emerge from his submergence in the horror that life must lead to the nescience of death...
...But "Hungerfield" in his latest book and "Roan Stallion" in one of his earliest are excellent poems that suspend the disbelief of those who think more optimistically...
...Still, it is true that in his poetic statements Jeffers has been as apt as Millay to slip into triteness or repetition of what he or another has said before better...
...Man is driven compulsively beyond the pleasure principle, and it is better to be a superman than a soft savior...
...But this is carping criticism of a good book about a great and too little understood poet...
...Harper...
...Unlike Millay and Jeffers, Thomas constantly became (Millay never fundamentally changed her style or her attitude toward life, and neither has Jeffers...
...But suffers from the cold, And is about to fall...
...1 Mine the Harvest...
...My banal prose does injustice to the vividness with which Millay often presents her preoccupations, but it is not an unjust summary of the unoriginality and unintegration of the thought that underlies the poems, and it points up the greater integration of the poems of Robinson Jeffers, Dylan Thomas and William Carlos Williams...
...By Elder Olson...
...164 pp...
...That Mr...
...Even in the inferior poems in Mine the Harvest, she speaks out for "Freedom not alone/ For oneself, but for all...
...There is also the fine free translation of Euripides' Hippolytus, called "The Cretan Woman," again about the dead and calling them back??eloquent, probably accurate as far as one who does not know Greek can check against other translations...
...The shorter poems are good, consistent with what he has said before, occasionally too much reiterations...
...Of these, the best are "The Beauty of Things," "The World's Wonders," "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones" (one of his best and too long to quote), and "Time of Disturbance," which represents the philosophy one prefers to disbelieve and perhaps should not: "The best is, in war or faction or ordinary vindictive life, not to take sides...
...Olson is a sensitive and meticulous reader...
...One way in which Thomas surpasses both Millay and Jeffers is that he consistently developed his mastery of his own peculiar insight and of his own individual way of expressing it...
...Of course, it is unfair to judge Millay by anything but her best...
...Of course, death has always been just around the corner, but we used to think it must be preceded by a long and serene period of prosperous happiness...
...Professor of English at Louisville University Since she was a public personality as well as a good poet, since she excited all friends and many critics, since she is dead, Edna St...
...Though his early poems were exciting, they were excessively difficult, both because he was confused in his reading of life and because he was incompletely disciplined as a saver...
...Olson makes this clear in The Poetry of Dylan Thomas3 almost as well as Thomas does in his Collected Poems is high praise of a critic...
...Many of the sonnets in "Epitaph for the Race of Man," such poems as "Moriturus" and "Elegy Before Death" and much else will be remembered, I hope, for centuries...
...the minds of men and women learn more quickly than their hearts...
...Love is soon over...
...so did William Carlos Williams??indeed, he is still becoming...
...By Edna St...
...death, which we must accept, we can't...
...unlike Jeffers, however, his constant preoccupation is with man, the only creature who "cannot escape suffering by flight," who can love and think and with invention and courage surpass "the pitiful dumb beasts" which man should love...
...life, though it permits the rapture of identification with what we cannot hold close enough, is brief...
...Vincent Millay's last book, Mine the Harvest,1 probably will be read widely...
...Williams's Poems (1909) only hindsight can see as promising, but from then on each volume has shown an integrated growth in both style and thought...
...Most of his long poems are melodramas that do not represent his views as adequately as his admirable free renderings of Medea and Hippolytus (in Hungerfield.2 his latest volume...
...The books by Millay and Jeffers are very good and should be read for a long time...
...Williams's poetry is hopeful without sentimentality, brave without self-pity, eloquent to both eye and ear because it is never amorphous but counted to "an exact measure: to imitate, not to copy nature, not to copy nature...
...From 1912, when "Renascence" was published, to 1942, when The Murder of Lidice came out, her faults and virtues have happened to please readers...
...Nevertheless, I guess boldly...
...What I don't like about Mr...
...He constantly affirms the new news of poetry that recognizes, accepts and transcends the condition of mortality: "My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something "that concerns you and concerns many men...
...according to publisher's gossip, she is the only American poet of our century who almost made a living from writing...
...Auden and Marianne Moore have...
...The title poem may wishfully fulfill his belief that it is inevitable and acceptable that his wife is dead...
...And, though I am indebted to his clarification of the early poems, I do not care particularly for his emphasis upon the early, imperfect poems at the expense of the admittedly superior later poems...
...Williams will, with Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Marianne Moore and a few others I cannot name confidently, be read the longest, since he tells news no man in any predictable century can expect to find elsewhere so exactly and movingly expressed...
...3 The Poetry of Dylan Thomas...
...The best in Mine the Harvest makes one regret greatly that Millay's fine talent was never consistently disciplined and therefore developed unevenly...
...115 pp...
...The marvel of Thomas's latest poems is that he adjusted to the difficult-to-bear despite the neuroticism which a recent article in the Reporter and literary gossip have made even those who eschew his poems aware of...
...the moral indignation that hoarsens orators is mostly a fool...
...His clarification of some of Thomas's poems??notably of his early sonnets??is admirable...
...3.00...
...Olson cogently remarks, for a contemporary to evaluate exactly a contemporary...
...Like Yeats who made "soul clap its hands and sing .../ For every tatter in its mortal dress," like Thomas who would not "go gentle into that good night," Williams celebrates the life he is losing with persistent ecstasy...
...3.00...
...As with Jeffers, part of the news of Williams's poetry is the sacred-ness of not-human nature...
...Random House...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 19
