Instant Opinions

...What the student of poetry will make of them is a question...

...What about Wyndham Lewis...

...There are 32 general essays, very various in character and quality...

...The convenience of having remarks about so many poets in one handy volume, where flap copy turns into history before our eyes, cannot make up for the false assertion implicit in the whole enterprise of the Concise Encyclopaedia that poetry is a subject to be studied in this way...

...still, a certain insularity is observable, as in this non-sentence under Foreign Influences on English poetry: "Apollinaire, Lorca, Pasternak, and a number of American poets— Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell, in particular—the poets of modem Greece, the German Expressionists and the French Surrealists have been accepted with interest and enthusiasm, yet direct imitation of them has rarely been attempted...

...English Poetry in Africa is one subject, while South African Poetry in English is another...

...Quite...

...The point is perhaps a little clarified by a similar rash of hurriedly dropped names in an article about Imagery by Hugh Kenner (otherwise one of the few really fine pieces in this book): "In recent years transatlantic cross-fertilization has been especially rapid, so that an English poet like Charles Tomlinson has been assisted by the example of Williams, Moore and Pound to make fecund derivations from Wordsworth...

...The editors' authority is similarly quiet in the Introduction, where they are at pains to disclaim any immodest ambition: "We have tried to collect information necessary to the student of poetry, and to represent the best contemporary critical opinion...

...Howard Nemerov, whose latest book is The Next Room of the Dream published by the University of Chicago Press, is the well-known poet and critic...

...There are signs in that remarkable passage that Mottram has been reading Ian Fleming...

...Charles Madge is adequate to the historical past of his subject, but to the fascinating possibilities of the theme at present he seems indifferent...

...For one last oddity, the discussion of Symbolism is given to a French writer, Yves Bonnefoy...

...and there are other evidences of editorial remissness, whether owing to laxness or caprice...

...A good deal...

...Whatever that means, it is clear that American poetry is a Foreign Influence...

...There is no critical opinion of Masters...

...What can he say, indeed, that will not be the mere setting of his opinion against the opinion of others at least equally qualified...

...The essay on American Poetry is given to E. N. W. Mottram, who teaches the subject at King's College, London University, and has a clear though not necessarily accurate idea of how things are: "The epic urge produced distinctive twentieth-century structures, unique in modern literature...

...Is that all it says...

...saddest of all these, Indian Poetry in English is "a blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere...

...But surely even a concise account should show an awareness of the investigations of Kenneth Burke, of Scott Buchanan (Poetry and Mathematics), T. R. Henn (The Apple and the Spectroscope), Herbert J. Muller (Science and Criticism), Stanley Edgar Hyman (The Tangled Bank), to mention only a few...

...If we seek information rather than criticism, the position is not necessarily better...

...It was perhaps not part of the subject to consider the scientist as poet in his proper work, e.g., the visions (for so they are) of Darcy Thompson or Charles Sherrington...

...The editors regret the omission of poets "many of whom we would prefer to have included," and imply that the omissions resulted from the advice of critics and scholars, some of whom "expressed violent disagreement...

...Well, it just says 'an admirer of hers is W. H. Auden, who wrote an introduction to her collected Doems.' But you said you didn't want information, only criticism...

...It says here: 'Robert Lowell praises Kunitz's "savage, symbolic drive...

...Naturally enough, despite the mention of Poe, Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, it is chiefly an account of the symbolist movement in France, with Eliot and Yeats appearing as brief afterthoughts in the final paragraph...

...Mottram's peroration on American Poetry is worth having almost entire: "There are signs that the youngest poets—Ginsberg, Corso, McClure, O'Hara, Ashbery, Levertov—taking their cues from Whitman, Williams, Pound and their recent disciple, Charles Olson, and also acknowledging the wider achievement of Lorca and Neruda, Mayakovsky and Apollinaire, are releasing themselves from an exhausted tradition of forms...

...Since there is so much more English than American past it is natural and right for the Concise Encyclopaedia to be more English than American...

...In the same writer's entries on Macleish and Sandburg, however, the products of their epic urge receive only the barest and most toneless mention, while Ginsberg has not got a separate entry in the Concise Encyclopaedia...

...if he knows more he may also know better (e.g., that the agent in all that pollenizing is really Wallace Stevens), but if he is a beginner I see no hope...

...Go to the Concise Encyclopaedia and bring me back the best contemporary critical opinion of Stanley Kunitz...

...There is a bibliography, with a note advising that some poets whose works are listed in the text are not included, but a few moments' perusal discovers poets whose works are listed in neither, poets whose bibliography is followed only up to seven or eight years ago while others are complete to 1962...

...Such bits of "concise" writing turn up fairly often...

...It just lists his books and says 'see also American Poetry.' Research under that heading yielded the following: "To these major figures we may add the native qualities of Sandburg, Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters speaking the speech of the Middle West " If these examples were not chosen at random, they could nevertheless be matched by a good many others...

...Encyclopaedias, handbooks, biographies, critiques, histories, surveys, periodicals, and anthologies of criticism come to mind in overwhelming numbers, and many of them are not compromised from the beginning by the simultaneous attempt to be eternal and up-to-the-minute...

...A certain provincial spirit appears also in Science and Poetry...

...His dominant response to the Concise Encyclopaedia was to be depressed by it, but will it not be churlish to say so in the face of such disarming acknowledgments...

...Kunitz, Stanley (1905- ), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize—" "Never mind the information now, just read the critical opinion...

...Our contributors sometimes felt that they were asked to condense the Holy Writ into a single sentence...

...This reviewer feels disadvantaged...

...It is natural for contributors given more space to shed more light, but even here concision gets in its knife, as in this example: "He is the master of terza rima and the radio and TV play," as well as others I shall be attending to presently...

...It was a splendid idea someone thought up to save the rolling-stock for the war effort...

...Edgar Lee Masters...

...It says 'he wrote a book of poems, One Way Song, which was praised by T. S. Eliot.' " "One to praise, and very few to love, eh...

...Being, one supposes, stuck for a sufficiently impressive list of examples to go with The Cantos and The Waste Land, he adds among other things The People, Yes and "perhaps" Conquistador and Howl, in order to say: "Here is a real American poetic achievement," etc...

...In the same way, it will do no good for the reviewer to ask the editors of the Concise Encyclopaedia if it is really necessary, because they have already gone to the trouble of putting it together, and here it is, a large volume bound in a blue of low brilliance with the title stamped in gold giving an appearance of unassertive authority (The Concise Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, compiled and edited by Stephen Spender and Donald Hall, Hawthorn, 415 pp., $15.00...

...Try Phyllis McGinley...

...Because poetry is discussed where possible under the name of the poet, works of unknown authorship tend to get left out or to turn up only by the way: Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight is mentioned once, under Langland (it is "the only other masterpiece in the alliterative style"), and the Ballads appear under Popular Poetry, where they get about as much attention as the combined efforts of Guest, Tupper, Hemans, and Longfellow...

...I fear that brings me to the point of judgment...

...The apparatus which makes possible the study of poetry is so immense and so immediately available that its presence in libraries cannot escape the notice of the dullest beginner...

...Their work contains the sense of that international world where poems are desperate acts committed under the shadow of recurrent disaster...

...Unfortunately you didn't see these posters until you had already shlepped your kit and caboodle through the blackout to a station, and by that time the answer, maybe a bit embarrassed, had to be Yes...

...It says: 'An admirer of hers is W. H. Auden.' " "You mean an admirer of her work, of course...

...The indigestible mass of the past is treated in such other entries as Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Middle English Lyric, Religion and Poetry, etc...

...The Empire, or its dissolution, gets a number of entries: Australian, Canadian, New Zealand Poetry are separately discussed...

...I shall comment on only a few...

...And if the student gets tired of all that, he can always go and start reading some poems...

...Finally, "We look forward to more controversy...

...You there in the corner, you're a student of poetry...

...In order to be Concise we have found it necessary to put a brutal limit on the number of words for each article...