The Language of Praise

...But it is an effect of our so living to raise up a small Moloch called Poetry, to be trotted through the streets on state occasions, borne on the shoulders of a few stainless prefabricated reputations, and utterly indifferent to the existence of poems...

...Perhaps many people share the feeble and passive delusion that these procedures sell books...

...I remember as one of many uninteresting experiences dining out with two ladies trained in French cookery...

...While the poet is alive and writing, it is not only fair but a necessity for him to believe that he will surpass in excellence Homer, Dante and Shakespeare...

...for indeed the few Americans who are at any time willing to put down a few dollars for poetry absolutely require (and may even deserve) an assurance that what they are getting is the real stuff throughout...

...Howard Nemerov, poet, novelist and critic, is spending the current year as writer-in-residence at Hollins College...

...Confirms----------'s early promise Can be read with complete pleasure...

...Or you might decide that he had never in his life read anything more complex or problematic than a menu, which is one sort of document you might under some circumstances read with complete pleasure...

...His latest book is New and Selected Poems...

...At the very best of the reality, in the result, he will probably have to settle for a good deal less (it is ominous even for the name of Elkanah Settle to obtrude itself in this discussion...

...This seems to mean, so far as meaning is among its intentions, that ---------- has printed everything...

...Less charitably, that he did not much like the Amoretti at all, but that his old friend Gabe Harvey had asked him if he wouldn't say something nice...

...It is by these things that we live...

...But probably this assurance is even more necessary to the owner than to the prospective purchaser, and the species of writing we have been considering really belongs to the class of "advertising after the fact," that grand sustainer of the economy which guarantees to the buyer of any product costing more than $1.50 a certain quantity of self-esteem, conveyable by literary means: that he has shown good taste, made a wise choice, identified himself with the elite, and so on...

...As this has scarcely been a review, I append a brief assignment for the reader convinced enough to try...

...And yet the Amoretti does contain a number of remarkable poems...

...the work of a distinguished American poet.' a poet of distinction...

...he wastes nothing...

...We were all eating pieces of leatherette chicken fried in floor-wax, but it reminded them of a chicken they had once shared at a little auberge in the Dordogne, and they got so fascinated with the comparison of recipes that they absolutely cleaned up their plates, even the bones...

...Whereas I Dearly beloved, the leatherette chicken is the poetry of this world, the poetry actually put before you...

...On with our examples: "----------is, in my opinion, the best poet under forty now writing...

...Nor is it done by thinking about something called Poetry as though that existed independently of one poem and another, or something called Greatness as though that were arrived at immediately, by fiat...

...anyone ought to be glad to read all the poems in this collection...

...The two ladies are the public voices of poets, critics, writing blurbs, ads, flap copy...

...together with, of course, a deal of inferior, minor, or occasional work...

...Now I suppose that if you saw it written: "Mr...

...To the majority of those who care for him as a great poet he is remembered by one poem, "To His Coy Mistress," and perhaps one more, "The Garden...

...Or if that is too cryptic, let us try a parable of sorts...

...Kay Boyle, Collected Poems (Knopf, $4.00), pages 7-8, 30...

...But the idea that our pleasure in a collection of verses ought to be complete, total, without exception, is a very popular one: "This is a completely engrossing, completely moving book...

...Andrew Marvell, a minor poet of the first rank, left poems to the number roughly of 50, a few of these in Latin...

...And the moral of that is, I suppose, whatever you care to make it...

...Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00), pages 3, 8, 19, 22-23, 65...

...For one thing, when and if you buy a book of poetry, you will be decently rewarded with the discovery of one or two poems, or three or four, that mean something to you and matter to you...

...But it takes an affectionate, or at least a candid, study to get to where you can make up your mind...

...an impression which the perusal of his book does not dispel...

...one of our most serious, able and distinguishable voices...

...He is also the most conserving poet I know...

...On their way to oblivion the books pass through the hands of the reviewer, sometimes through his mind, and it may happen that he blows into them a brief and puffy little life, so that they live a little...

...Probably the first two steps in the process could be omitted without making any significant change in this highly ritualized situation, in what we may fancily call the "status in reality" of books of poetry...

...For it is well known that existence, among us, is conferred only by public acknowledgment, and for many a poem it would be a greater tragedy not to be reviewed than not to be written...

...As it was said by the ancient Chinese poet No Mo: If you leave off being invidious A nd cease defensively simplifying, You learn from ten thousand examples What beauty is...

...It is merely a matter of common sense to allow that many of the poems covered by these encomia not only empirically are, but in principle had to be, were destined in the moment of their conception to be, made up of insupportable pretension and unreadable guff in roughly equal parts...

...Winfield Townley Scott, Collected Poems (Macmillan, $7.50), pages 97-98, 102-115, 291-292, 295296...

...maybe he was only lucky a couple of times...

...But the formula does raise a problem: If nine of ten anythings are distinguished, what is the tenth...

...I suppose you can't make a man sore by telling him he is distinguished, though "distinguishable" seems rather to hedge on the full commitment, achieving a subtlety not far from cowardice...

...Which is not to say that all poetry is dreadful, that the present time is conspicuously failing in an "obligation" to excellence, or even to say that all the poetry of the present is either academically glib or written by hairy illiterates...

...Readers who love poetry will have read a few others, still anthology pieces: "On a Drop of Dew," "The Mower to the Glo-Worms," "Bermudas," one or two of the Dialogues, "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.' Beyond that, it is left for poets and "specialists in the period" to discover beauties and grandeurs undisclosed to a public view, as in "Upon Appleton House" or "The Last Instructions to a Painter...

...For if you consider the other side of this coin, the very people most assiduous in issuing blanket endorsements of the sort I have cited are found in other contexts lamenting that Poetry is in a bad way (which it always is, I guess), and even berating the tired old Modern World for not producing Great Poets in sufficiently large numbers...

...This is a more straightforwardly generous offer than one usually gets, suggesting a salami which can be eaten with complete pleasure or the remainder returned for complete refund...

...It is to say only this, that poetry, that odd beast, exists in such and such a manner, as one poem and then another poem, and then another poem after that...

...Spenser's Amoretti are everywhere solid, sensitive, deeply realized, always interesting, and can be read by anyone with complete pleasure," you might conclude charitably that the writer had not read the Amoretti, but was somehow trapped in a social situation such that he didn't want to admit it...

...for these things are in the first instance ritual dramas played by Time for the malefit of the vulgar...

...his poems are everywhere solid, sensitive, and deeply realized...

...To understate the point, it would be no dishonor for him to achieve what Marvell achieved, and exist in the immortality of his literature as Marvell does in his...

...These few pieces may or may not lead you on to find that the poet's decisions are right decisions in other of his poems as well...

...Both kinds of statement about equally manifest cynicism, fatigue, impatience, or indifference...

...and above all it is not done the other way round, by avowing that X is a great poet and then trying to read his poems on that basis...

...Most of these and many similar statements are signed by what we may call, with no more than unavoidable irony, distinguished names in the poetry business, the names of persons who on other occasions have been known to deplore the inflation of our language, the pretensions of book reviewers, the vulgarity of advertising, etc...

...The moral is that some things are better than others...

...s poems are always interesting...

...And the recipes of the haute cuisine go as follows: "Very distinguished writing...