The Poetry of Max Eastman:

...The structure of his poems is firm like steel or glass: Here is no amoeba, groping with blind pseudopodia, no "cult of unintelligibility...

...Perhaps this explains his poignant deep confessional that his will is "...vague water welling through the dark, Holding all substances except the spark...

...His Greek "nothing-too-much" keeps him from the cascade of glory which poured over Job out of the whirlwind, from the second sight of Blake, from the mad sanity of Isaiah, or even the Dionysian mysteries of the later Euripides...

...He gains much by this...

...So Eastman's poetry is not ectoplasm, but always the supple, swift flesh of the athlete, the dimpled, warm flesh of Galatea become girl...

...And here vision of man's fate, raised above all partisan sociologies in "Too Many People," sees without illusion or despair the danger of men's quantity and the need of man's quality.Here is austere yet rich-burning philosophical acceptance of earth in the magnificent "Hymn in Praise of Autumn": "A poet might in your radiance take such birth...

...And what unique and wonderful excellence it is...

...Note the steel-sharp, glass-clear "Message to Siberia" (where Pushkin becomes an English classic): "The heavy-hanging chains will fall, The walls will crumble at a word, And freedom greet you in the light, And brothers give you back the sword...

...That is the voice of great poetry: classical form, firm as the prism of glass...

...A Greek of the great period might have written that...

...it sends the heart on its way like the bird that is ever the pilgrim of the sun...

...Note the great, somber-rich lithograph - in - technicolor, "November" (of which I can quote only the sextet): "What gaunt great madness of the poet earth Preserves that stricken whisper and keeps sweet The seeds of corpses and the rooty feet Of the chilled relics of his withered dream...

...surely the racy, tanged, drawling Yankee wisdom-in-song of Robert Frost...

...So, in "The April Earth," he feels the Dionysian ecstasy--A sky-thrown torch has kindled me to flame...

...And, in other poems, Max Eastman adds to a texture lucid as mathematics the hand that dips words in the rainbow, the eye that sees the bubbles winking at the brim...

...Your cool hard rocklike courage steady beside him, Your measureless wealth of tenderness never denied him, He might from his opulent vagueness at last stand forth...

...Religion--The sensuous embrace of the living cosmos by reason as well as passion, which only mysticism knows--is beyond him...

...surely a few of the dark nobilities of Edwin Arlington Robinson...

...In his prose consciously (as a creed), in his poetry unconsciously (as an art), Max Eastman prefers the Greek to the Hebrew (he is Euripides, not Solomon...

...This knowledge that poetry raises the wetness of water to the nth power of imaginative truth infuses Eastman's own poetry...

...Here modern love poetry reaches maturity wherein passion feels yet reason knows: "I'll warm your beauty like the light, Like the round air embrace you quite, And as the sea gives blue Give love to you...

...And so, in the sweet and glorious riot of "Swamp Maple," he fills the strict pattern of the firm glass with the sun fractured into dancing color...

...Texture, too, is his road to the freedom of the spirit...

...the love that is like "tranquil pools," the "liquid jewels of the forest," where the hunted runner cools his fevered flesh...

...This firm, clear texture of logic is French, or better, in its great manifestations, Greek...

...And certainly these firm textures and gleaming colors of Max Eastman...

...What mirth is in his anguish and what gleam Of the dry wounds of anguish in his mirth...

...In his poetry, he concretely realizes the sheer being of significant reality: "the wan and wavy motion" of aquarium fishes, "stern-lipped and pale and wonder-eyed...

...but only poetry conveys to us the realization that water is wet...

...the exquisite painting of Wang Wei, fashioned "so many mounds mournful of years ago," still holding over the centuries its "aged plum tree bearing lonely bloom...

...The uniqueness of Max Eastman's poetry lies in a brilliant harmony of classical line with romantic color...

...Thus, science and prose give us the useful analysis of water into H2O...

...It has kept him from the fashionable fallacies of our darkling plain--whether the confusion of poetry with propaganda, or its equal confusion not with utility but with futility and the arid cerebrality of abstract intellectualism...

...Give beauty when you give your heart, Give tenderness, a river, Give love which is the giving art, But give the wild will never...

...From the many voices of our time, what will remain in the ear of Eternity as too memorable to be forgotten...

...Revieived by E. Merrill Root Author, "Seeds of Time," "The Way of All Spirit," and other prose and poetry MAX EASTMAN, in his Enjoyment of Poetry, brilliantly showed us that the essence of poetry lies not in the gift of light for practical doing, but in the concrete realization of sheer being...

...Surely at least a few of the early perfect lyrics of Edna Millay...

...Yet, this brilliant mind (clear as the Euclid who "looked on beauty bare") unites with the passion of a stronger Shelley...

...he loses something...

...Here--as the poet has experienced nature, great men, great hours, love, grief for earth's doom arid hope for earth's glory--is the diary of the heart, during five decades, of one of the choice and gracious spirits of our time, set to a lovely Mozart-music...

...romantic color, free as the play of light that the prism turns to rainbow...

...the truth of a John Reed, who died not for a primitive Communism that he too generously misunderstood, but for the creative lava in youth's arterial blood...

...But thus to set limits to his beautiful gift, as always with the real and the great, is only to limit, and thus to define, its unique essential excellence...