Poetry Roundup
UNTERECKER, JOHN
By John Unterecker Poetry Roundup Annually we are told by the devotees of poetry that we are on the verge of a great revival of interest in Romantic or Classical forms. Those of the Romantic...
...And distance ? A requisite of the just, which is proportion, Or holy measure, that the sages loved, Being so fond of stringed instruments and so Mild: they liked puppies as well as you...
...II words disappear...
...Neil Weiss (Changes of Garments, Indiana University...
...From this identification with natural forces comes her poetry, mystical, abstract, characterized by incantations, spells and invocations...
...Howard Moss (A Swimmer in the Air, Scribner's, $3.00) writes supple, frequently satirical poetry that is infallibly graceful...
...Hoskins's first book of poetry, and it is a fine one...
...In frequently powerful and always passionate verse, she reveals herself...
...He is there in poems which materialize out of hi- experience as child, lover, poet, and man in the world...
...Her dominant theme—one of the great themes of Romantic poetry—sets perishable man against the enduring world...
...The title poem of his new collection The Persimmon Tree (Scribner's, $3.00) and the two closely related lyrics, "To the Creative Imagination" and "Imagination the Healer," develop the esthetic principles about which Viereck works...
...Take, for example, Marcia Nardi's Poems (Alan Swallow, $2.00...
...In "Colorado," for instance, the "Peaks too cold for the warm west to redden' become linked in the poet's mind to "the remote/Population of memory the shadowy ones" who, though dead, seem still in retrospect "luminous as gems": "A property of distance...
...That does not mean, however, that it is not interesting...
...Like Fitzgerald, Peter Viereck is most likely to appeal to the thoughtful reader...
...Vivid, sometimes almost crabbed, they produce a poetry which assaults the reader in memorable statements like that in the last two lines quoted above...
...These lines, a fair sample of Vie-reck's style, are typical of the bulk of his poetry...
...Those of the Romantic persuasion— currently spearheaded by the "San Francisco school"—are somewhat louder in their celebration of the impending revolution than the Classicists who harp, lute and lyre most doggedly their conservative strain...
...Miss Nardi, who was recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing, belongs to that intense group of Romantic poets whose primary object is the communication not so much of a personal vision as of personality itself...
...In "And I Knew the Body a Sea" she is explicit: "How I envy the dog that brings yon...
...In the process, they create intellectually exciting poetry: "We dodge with outrage or derision Truths that assault us squashily: Each clowning, sweetish, harshcored vision That shoots from the persimmon tree...
...2.75) and Kenneth Rexroth (In Defense of the Earth, New Directions, $3.00) are also, like the ladies discussed above, poets who rely a great deal on personality for their poetic effects...
...And saw fit, being profound, not to reflect Chaos unbounded, but to extract therefrom Numerous order and magnificence...
...Love I Make It Because I Write It," the last poem in the volume, celebrates in title and text her central interest: the delights and anguish of flesh...
...Unlike Miss Nardi, who draws the world in toward herself, Miss Raine projects herself into the world: "I am pure loneliness I am empty air I am drifting cloud...
...But even in the enduring world everything perishes...
...But when they work—when the human contact Rexroth so much desires between himself as breathing poet and the reader as breathing, private man does take place—they are splendid...
...Brief bloom, we always wrong you...
...What of the other group—the Classicists or near-Classicists whose personalities remain their own, whose private lives remain private, whom we can never know as intimately as, for instance, any reader of Miss Nardi's volume is bound to know her, and who produce poems which (ideally, at least) become independent objects...
...Rexroth, leader of the "San Francisco Renaissance" mentioned above and a far less lyrical poet than Weiss, extemporizes facile improvisations of "stars, insects, mountains and daughters" into poems...
...earth Is a drabber patch than need have been...
...Hoskins—does not permit paraphrase...
...And almost everyone by now knows that Phyllis McGinley can do no wrong...
...Time past never does become time present: "The sun that rose From the sea this morning Will never return, For the broadcast light That brightens the leaves And glances on water Will travel tonight On its long journey Out of the universe, Never this sun, This world, and never Again, this watcher...
...Poets of enormous technical dexterity, they demand of the reader feats of intellectual gymnastics which he may be unwilling or incompetent to perform...
...Now certainly there is poetry here, but it is made subservient to passion...
...But one remembers, and I think this is true of Rexroth's volume also, not so much the poetry as the poet...
...A very different kind of personal poetry is found in Kathleen Raine's work (Collected Poems, Random House, $3.50...
...poetry continues to be one of the least popular art forms, and such poetry as is produced finds a very small audience indeed...
...Kenneth Fearing (New and Selected Poems, Indiana University, $3.95), though almost always damned or praised for his politics, has a remarkably accurate ear and a fine feeling for the cadences of speech which make his poems good ones in spite of their themes rather than because of them...
...These concluding lines of her fine poem "The Moment" show Miss Raine at her best, when the very personal expands into a vision of order which encompasses both the mutable world and the observing, mutable poet...
...So much, for the moment, for those poets whose subject matter is primarily personal, who, with Kenneth Rexroth, feel "Non-personal relations/ Are by nature chaotic...
...Her graceful, gay lyrics, The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley, have just been reissued in an inexpensive paperback format (Compass Books, $.95) which should bring her a wider audience and more praise...
...Beautifully realized, they are a delight...
...Because they are improvisations, some of these poems seem a little diffuse...
...Most effective in such careful lyrics as "Delos" or in such long poems as "Deus Loci" and "Fangbrand," where intricate sentences can interlace the subtle pattern of his verse, Durrell celebrates the islands of the Mediterranean in eloquent language: "On charts they fall like lace, Islands consuming in a sea Born dense with its own blue: And like repairing mirrors holding up Small towns and trees and rivers To the still air, the lovely air...
...your stick And shakes off the water as I would shake off Of art and poetry all talk To lie on the dry shore near your breath...
...Precise, complex poems that seem at first glance simple and, on recollection, significant, his work—like that of Mrs...
...Lawrence Durrell, one of the finest poets now writing, has selected poems for his American paperback debut from the four volumes of his poetry previously published in England...
...the page is gone and I am there...
...Villa Narcisse is Mrs...
...For, though rooted in experience and deeply personal, his verse manages also to achieve a kind of coldness, a distance from his subject that lets it become the occasion for thought...
...Robert Fitzgerald, whose new collection In the Rose of Time (New Directions, $3.00) represents a selection of the best work of his entire poetic production, is perhaps the one man who might possibly appeal to both Classicists and Romantics...
...The remaining poets I wish to mention are primarily lyricists, though they have almost nothing else in common...
...Weiss reveals himself in lyrics...
...But both revivals, in the meantime, remain somewhere beneath the horizon...
...Almost never really lyrical (Viereck's poetry is incredibly difficult to read aloud), the poems have a strength and vitality perhaps in the long run better than lyricism itself...
...In this poem and in the almost luridly intimate "Country Letter," Miss Nardi is likely to make the reader of conservative taste feel something like a Peeping Tom...
...Two members of this camp are Katherine Hoskins (Villa Narcisse, Noonday, $3.00) and Lawrence Durrell (Selected Poems, Evergreen, $1.25...
...Close in tone to the metaphysical poets of the 17th century but nevertheless very modern in diction and style, these poems are so tightly knit as to forbid the quotation of excerpts...
...they ramble on, creating their effects as much by accident, I think, as by design...
...Weiss notes in his lyric "Envoi...
...For his own good, he should make the effort...
Vol. 40 • June 1957 • No. 26
