A Study of Continuity and Change

...It recalls, as do other passages and touches, an almost 19th-century romanticism, but does not get out of hand...

...Without bizar-reries or mad touches, they are "square," if you will, dedicated to the myth of beauty and joy...

...In you his new entelechy began Where now the gawp of Babel fills the air...

...The right word is usually in the right place, but since the poems move in terms of the line, not in terms of the word, the emphasis is on the large unit...

...It is with such reminders and arrows pointed like this that Warren drags the beast home...

...his preoccupation with violence, with disaster "that blooms like the dandelion," is more obsessive...

...Lowell's translation will hardly do that...

...But this is a thorough bear, rumpled and sullen...

...A. D. Hope, the Australian poet, works in another order of language (Collected Poems 1930-1965...

...Lowell's ear for a sound, for the secretive mad action of a fieldmouse playing like a child or gamester, is but one instance of the intractable, the unpredictable, the absolutely unexpected that is always cropping up in his poems...

...Schooled, passionate in the craft, austere of design but brilliant of texture, these poems are strict and pure, as in the splendid "Leopard," "Motion Toward Noon," "The Protestant...

...Hannibal, who crossed the Alps, remains but a "purple patch/for schoolboys, and a theme for declamation...

...But Warren is more grim and time-haunted...

...And still transmuted, the long placid strand Sinks into crystal, pressed in deepening space...

...But how much else was tamed and dulled...

...The heroic stance has long been seen through...

...In this same poem the line "Anywhere but somewhere else," with the suggestion of Baudelaire's "Anywhere out of this world," underlines his vigorous weariness with the world of a vanishing culture once dedicated to the "dark design/spun by God and Cotton Mather...

...Statues are being wrenched from their pedestals, graffiti scribbled on them...

...One drifts in and out of the interlockings of past and present...

...And frequently, too, lines like this last one—conventional and trite...

...Where Lowell cuts the inter-connections between the stanzas of a poem such as "Near the Ocean," forcing the reader to make the leap from ancient Greece to New York, Hope sustains a kind of old-fashioned continuity...

...And in these late poems the suspendings of the lines —the spaces between them, the questions put, the questions raised—are a part of the same point...

...But then, there is a great care about form...

...we have a view in one handsome volume of the versatility and variety of the poet's work, its range and compass...

...So do the sonnets on the ruins of time of those Renaissance poets Quevedo and Gongora...

...Death is only the transfer of energy to a new form...

...214 pp...

...works with a very certain kind of exactness: an exactness of inward sight...

...And imagination has given particularity wings, or in this case scythes...

...After a brief prayer for his daughter we return, however, to the dominant note: New England of those vanishing emblems, the spire and flagpole...

...4.50...

...The surprise is that Lowell's style can accommodate in one stanza lines like these: All life's grandeur is something with a girl in summer . . . elated as the President girdled by his establishment this Sunday morning, free to chaff his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff "Bear-cuffed" may do it...

...He is not breaking down form and inviting chaos...

...When Johnson's tyrant Xerxes is humbled ("Th' insulted sea with humbler thoughts he gains,/A single skiff to speed his flight remains"), we scarcely see the action for the words...

...they are sensual, sumptuous, dazzling...

...The old keeping of proportions cannot be held to...

...Yet "A Dream" moves with classical regularity into a strange fever, a blaze of pain...

...the termite in the woodwork sleeps— listen, the creatures of the night obsessive, casual, sure of foot, go on grinding, while the sun's daily remorseful blackout dawns...

...But that the most public office in the world can be metaphorized remains the liberating matter, and is in part what these new poems are doing: subverting and then converting the "real" —even the most public and melodramatic parts of it—into poetry...

...With Sejanus, Pompey and Crassus, we are in the thick of triumphal cars and palm-embroidered robes for Zeus...

...Your whole position must be reconsidered...

...Often last lines mock in a dry voice the legalities and rationalities of our institutions...

...And none arise to find, renew, prolong The harmonies of your enchanted song...

...Who speaks for Europe now...

...The most ambitious translation (Lowell calls it an "imitation") is Juvenal's "The Vanity of Human Wishes...

...That smooth rapid rhythm, that crisp decision—they are always with him...

...It is not only exact...

...His white spire and flag-/ pole sticking out above the fog./like old white china doorknobs...

...From the handsome and kind-hearted boy to mother's best daughter, no one escapes...

...At one time a student of Yvor Winters, her disciplined fastidious poems indicate that pure sorting out, that trained eye and line that Winters' own work is so known for...

...the shades of the dark night of the Roman Empire settle about us while the energetic idiom—whether resorting to slang for its punch ("sad sacks in heat") or active dramatization—more than suggests a parallel between Rome's long decadence and our delinquencies...

...Viking...

...At times he seems a melodramatist of terror and the irreconcilables...

...meditations on living-and-dying...

...The few who can Know only the recourses of despair...

...60 pp...

...Behind each bush, perhaps a knife...

...As for the five new poems, they have the old shock, a contagiously exciting one...

...each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub, hides a policeman with a club...

...Like Yeats, Lowell is ever drawn to the violent and energetic...

...Death is only the fulfilment of a wish...

...Indeed, Miss Stanford exerts such preciseness of pressure on the subject that the visuals seem to be seen and sensed in other ways...

...The ruthless rush for "high places," the incessant training in the "art/of climbing," the infection of riches and the destroying acids of power— all get their due of coarse-grained, hard-headed portraiture...

...Not too much to recommend about it, "small war on the heels of small/war...

...Or the defective child...

...The couplets lumber with a superb monotony...

...Addressed to his "Dear Cousin," it moves on to the humorous and sensitive quietism of the stanzas on his daughter's guinea pigs: "little pacific things, who graze/the grass about their box, they praise/whatever stupor gave them breath/to multiply before their death," and the wit of "only a vegetarian God/could look on them and call them good...

...ballads, as in the "Ballad of the Boxcars" with its loping, compelling rhvthm and its tough-hombre diction...

...Don't worship Success...

...For example: Around this higher center climb the waves— This round of sand, this drum, this hollow cone— And will not drop till Noah call them home...

...There are genre scenes—from New England to Kentucky...

...In the past it put one to sleep...

...ask for a healthy body and a healthy spirit...

...old age its every wrinkle...

...In "The Bear"—that dialogue between Rose Red and Snow White—they touch at something fanciful and magic...

...And the words are weighed in a very special way...

...In "Waking Early One Sunday Morning" you have the astonishing lines: Vermin run for their imstoppered holes: In some dark nook a fieldmouse rolls a marble, hours on end, then stops...

...And will not drop till in a shelving sigh The dunes lie level with the random sand And they are gone, and silence calls us home...

...Seducers will spoil them, or Time...

...In "Fourth of July in Maine" the note is more genial and light, more intimate in tone at parts...

...Chock-a-block with such gentilities is much periphrasis, interrupted by capitals: "Stern Famine guards the solitary coast,/ And Winter barricades the realms of Frost...

...So is that frequent opposing of the blunt matter-of-fact line against a philosophical language...

...Lowell has substituted particularity for generalization: "Tell us of his return...

...Profane...

...Johnson's translation: "Let observation with extensive view/Survey mankind from China to Peru...

...In these Selected Poems: New and Old of Robert Penn Warren (Random House...

...There is no end of depravity...

...One sequence is on a suicide, another on the death of a Vermont farmer...

...In these later poems as in his earlier work, Warren's scope reminds one of Thomas Hardy's: his interest in the plain realisms, the locality of customs, his novelist's interest in the psychological and dramatic...

...and the "Ode to Spring" with its variant on the famous carpe diem theme, that essential Roman pessimism, "Night hems us in, and ghosts, and death's close clay...

...All those repeated warnings to seize today what may well be lost tomorrow reinforce a dominant tone and theme...

...And the sight determines the "form...

...Syntax is never ambiguous...

...When first the college rolls receive his name/The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame...

...The line is long and not organized tightly but floating, as it were, in the medium of its sensibility...

...don't fear death...

...And in other ways, too, Lowell's translation galvanizes that ancient world for us...

...Aside from matters of general tone, many particulars are rendered differently in the two translations...

...Where Johnson has Gold undoing fragile and infinitely corruptible Man, Lowell has Success and Power...

...7.95...

...is half original poems and half translations...

...Sadly profane, the world in 1967...

...What is happening...

...Is/Existence the adequate and only target/For the total reverence of the heart...

...Whose wish...

...have courage . . . is the sober conclusion...

...a poem like "Court Martial" that takes us back to the Civil War...

...Far less structured by the outward form, Ann Stanford (The Weathercock...

...As in the accuracy of loathsome "subway-green," or in the poem "Central Park": We beg delinquents for our life...

...A single ship,/ scything for sea-room through the Persian dead...

...Ugliness is given its every wart...

...She has a metaphysical hardness and closeness of focus...

...Johnson emphasized his moral by substituting contemporary and/or local illustrious figures for Roman ones...

...The mire and woe of the human condition...

...Or as he himself has said: "Poetry is principally concerned to 'express' its subject and in doing so to create an emotion which is the feeling of the poem and not the feeling of the poet...

...He is vigorously in the English tradition, proceeding not by an inner music but by a more outward manner...

...reaches into memory...

...Viking...

...All you have to do is not argue...

...We prefer more waywardness, more expressionist vividness of language...

...Or the tuning down of the tone by such prosaicisms as: "In the age of dentures and reduced alcoholic intake...

...There are those country scenes, specifically farm-hand and deep rural...

...They are reconstructions of the past...

...People of the period must have experienced a shock to read of the only recently dead, great Swift: "And Swift expires a driv'ler and a show," and to read also that Marlborough died in dotage...

...She can be simple and open ("And the oats made meadows of the early year"), but usually she curvets on one point with a kind of geometrical intensity...

...The black snake rearing up "big in his ruined room" in the wheat shock that the threshers uncover (one thinks of a formidable instance of that same vision of evil in his long poem "Brother to Dragons") or the octopus in another poem...

...taboos are broken...

...5.75...

...Not only has Cotton Mather's work long been undone...

...This vision of the named and unnamed dark, the monsters (and no heroes to combat them), and of those general villains, Time and History, turns up in many guises...

...Those who have no Latin are familiar with it from Dr...

...In a sense Hope is literary the way many poets have ceased to be...

...In the totality of the book its shadow is the most weighty...

...Then motion, motion let tlie seabirds cry, Languor on languor let the summer turn Beyond the utmost of the ripening spray...

...He rhymes, he works in stanzaic forms...

...Original Sin, Crime, History—until the recent poems, some 90 pages of them, mostly in sequences under titles such as "Notes On a Life to Be Lived" and "Tale of Time...

...A policeman counts his bullets "like beads" and it is this country's destiny "until the end of time/to police the earth, a ghost/orbiting forever lost/in our monotonous sublime...

...Death is only a technical correction of the market...

...Robust of imagination as in "Imperial Adam," or delicate as air in "Chorale," his work has that largeness of spirit, that command and vigor of a mind that wants to rule its subject—to keep it all coherently out there...

...It may numb you, as satire can, by its repeated lashings, its unrelieved harshness...

...He seems grandly at home in his orderly arrangements...

...We follow Warren's career from the close-knit textures and polished surfaces of those early metaphysical poems, the framed scenes of "The Garden," "Love's Parable," "Picnic Remembered," "Bearded Oaks" to those Eleven Poems on Terror...

...These lines from "A Letter from Rome"—a long poem in ottava rima invoking the spirit of Byron and ending with a fine damnation of the vespa and motor bike—might give a clue to what he does: You spoke for Europe as you spoke for Man, Taught him to pray, to probe, to dream, to dare...

...Juvenal went down the list, bringing to every renown, nearly every action, a brutal reversal...

...he favors coherence and logical connections...

...300 pp...

...Among Hope's best efforts are his love poems...

...That it dominates is the point...

...It is etched...

...This absence of dynamics, of dramatizing form, is a kind of puzzlement...

...Other translations are from Horace: the "Ode to Cleopatra" with the lines, "While Cleopatra with her depraved gangs,/germs of the Empire...