Language Noble, Witty and Wild
CARRIGUE, JEAN
ON POETRY Language Noble, Witty and Wild By Jean Garrigue The Collected Poems of Horace Gregory (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 226 pp" $5,00) are in a sense Collected Voices. The voices speak from...
...In the last poems, especially those with Italian settings, Gregory enters another dimension, achieving another kind of tempered beauty of phrase and command...
...His art, subtle like the virtues his poetry lives by, expresses a tragic view in a nervous-veined and noble language...
...Iced drinks are boiling...
...To make beauty out of the beautiful is exceedingly difficult...
...Fools elect fools...
...Especially in the former, we have many side glimpses of the ruined face off--forgotten phrase-the American Dream...
...The (again) conversational style is relaxed and quipful, gently joking with the images, and on their own terms, of a childhood spent with Hollywood props, including the dew-claw of the famed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, and mad scientist magazines...
...In contrast, John Berryman in his latest book (77 Dream Songs, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 84 pp., $3.95) arrives at a jaunty smashing up or breaking down of the noble stances of language for his own most desperate and/or sophisticated purposes...
...Amiably Jarrell renders the local scene...
...Bones, old nobodaddy doppleganger, seizures of lust, bad conscience, and those other states of mind and being that plague any hero of bad luck and excruciated consciousness...
...to deal with the already classically perfected-a tremendous demand...
...I hold in my own hands, in happiness, Nothing: the nothing for which there's no reward...
...His eye on the world is sharp but his greater concern is to see it in its widest implications -which is, in an essential sense, to mythologize it...
...But the larger void -what is that...
...Drinks are boiling...
...and No Retreat (1933...
...But when he is not being so jestful, he writes in "The Old and the New Masters" a masterful poem...
...The Bomb...
...Incredible panic rules...
...most are anonymous: cries at the moment the mask is being removed...
...The worse anyone feels, the worse treated he is...
...Dextrous and indefatigably brilliant as he usually is, one can, if one quarrels with Jarrell's elected genre, raise this question as one becomes restless for his former intensities...
...Does Jarrell sometimes play poetry down too much to accomplish this...
...But one can only applaud his subtle humane wisdom when he concludes "Thinking of The Lost World": I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found Columns whose gray illegible advertisements My soul has memorized world after world: LOST-NOTHING...
...and leave them there, and no one else can sell such pity and such glory, such light, such hope even down to the last magnificent, half-forgotten love affair.' Gregory's Muse has a particularly Public Face in his first two books, Chelsea Rooming House (1930) JEAN GARRIGUE, the poet and critic, writes frequently for The Hudson Review, Poetry and the New Yorker...
...If this classic moderation can make for an effect of almost impersonal objectivity, the spirit opposes with feverishness...
...STRAYED FROM NOWHERE...
...The sacred state of being a child is another, in the title poem and in other poems, where ironical whimsy fences off the greater dangers of any just possible platitudinous nostalgia...
...Some are famous: Melville and Emerson...
...Her latest book of verse is Country Without Maps...
...and for this reviewer's taste, when he is less picturesque (and almost perversely good-humored), he is at his best...
...Gregory's poems are invariably formal, even when they are playing with the vernacular and montage effects...
...If Jarrell must allude to the well-known foibles, he is on the other hand worshipful of the Great Source and forgiving of the sadder trials of the Domesticated Dream...
...Death a German expert...
...A characteristic form, the monologue or dialogue, A characteristic effect, that of the lucid and haunted, The manner is lucid but it is dealing with shadowy presences or with wind, silence, darkness, or with the forces behind the reality of our times, This effect of the lucid and haunted is Gregory's particular own...
...Horace Gregory is an old master of the clear-cut articulations of the musical line, the incised image, and of the architecture of a poem...
...Three Allegories of Bellini," in short, taut lines, creates a wonderfully disinterested, dry and complicated "modern" comment: Its delicate vitality suspended from line to line, its precise visual drama allow it to hover over delightful spaces...
...the three on Frost ("your gorgeous sentence done...
...Bones talk or feel in a very special patois, a spirited jabber-wocky, abbreviated and cut down to the bone and often to the quick, full of quirks and an under-sense of half-sung talk, sometimes near some room, it might seem, of Bedlam's many...
...Nothing's the same,/sir,-taking cover...
...Or the social setting is employed for its dual aspects: realistic descriptive exactitude on the one hand, and on the other, the dramatic situation shaped by old symbolisms, as if the actors were recapitulations of previous memories...
...Thus the tension...
...In later poems he treats the furred penthouse with as much nervous, ironical ease...
...NO REWARD...
...But Woman is not the only subject of this "Lost World...
...These semi-private, punning, crafty songs skin language to the bone to state what it's like for Henry, the In-tellectual's Everyman-"Cawdor-uneasy, disambitious, mourning/the whole implausible necessary thing"-in everybody's general plot...
...People are blowing and beating each other without mercy...
...It is a lingo, a lingua franca that skates on the thinnest ice of "sense.' Underneath boil the anarchic waters of rage and nonsense...
...What the novelists have considered their province, he has equally taken for his own: It is not money, but power that lives in money That heats the blood and turns the soul to ashes, Freezes the heart, and changes life to clay, Invisible spirit against the human spirit, This is the speech of a bought man, a "second-string" violinist owned by a blonde oil-well heiress who is the American version of the frozen and freezing quasi Medusa, But Gregory's poetry is not preponderantly a poetry of the urban scene, and it is to be noted that if in the early poems the emphasis is toward that, or the social reality, as it were, in the later poems it is far more toward the mythic or the metaphysical...
...But sense so close to nonsense can be sparkling, wild and witty, and as close to the target truth as it is comfortable for language to get...
...The voices speak from out of history, from the past, from graves, ruined mansions, or from rooming houses...
...Randall Jarrell's long poem to Woman, in The Lost World (Macmillan, 69 pp., $3.95), is a triumph of the sleight-of hand and a supreme piece of shifty praise...
...No doubt it is good for the land we live in to get its image back...
...asks M'Phail, imaginary character, and concludes with grisly self-mockery: 'I am God's white-haired boy, I almost love the way I sell my lips, my blood, my heart...
...These are social-anger poems, city-street poems-written in the stony light of the Great Depression...
...Pound a father (his bankers Yankee-doodling: , dew tell"), Joyce a ghost, Cummings in the wings--the loose dream-diary continuity offers many chances for the occasional poem: the moving one for Roethke, the "garden master...
...This conversational tribute, tongue somewhat in cheek, taking away with one hand what is given with the other, skirts most of the dangers attendant on dealing with Archetypes by being so playful about the Cosmic Jest...
...Do I have to prove I can sell anything...
...in this case, suggestion is all...
...the "Lay for Ike," a hilarious take-off...
...Almost everyone is in it: Freud, the Bible, the Ephesian Diana of countless breasts, but above all, Woman, both Mother and the Good Whore, Fertility Symbol and Shopper, for whom the Supermarkets were conceived, not to mention the Ladies' Home Journal, benign in her banality, refuter of logic, a beater of eggs, firm believer in ovens, Smug Earth Principle with her airy feet always on the ground...
...A characteristic feeling of these poems is disquiet...
...This is also true of "Beyond the Pyramid" and "Concerto in Tuscany," where a central theme emerges in new form...
...Where the Italian landscape is concerned, his touch is flawless...
...His Henry and Mr...
...the tone is, for lack of a better word, aristocratic, An early Latinist, translator of Catullus (193 1) and Ovid (1958), Gregory never relinquishes his ordered control, even a crisp, hard polish of line...
...I am, outside...
...His "hellbabies," drunks, salesmen, police sergeants, lonely sensitives, are voices out of the theater of some vaster play--characters, too, of their own void, warped by the pressures of circumstances...
...And in such dramatic lyrics as "A Temptation of Odysseus,' "Homage to Circe," "A Foreigner Comes to Earth on Boston Common,' "The Rehearsal," the visual brilliance and the music of these clear, calm, troubling poems evoke other parts of the mystery...
...There is, as well, a running account of "horrible" Henry's sufferings, debates with Mr...
Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 4
