Poets of Our Times

...Nonetheless, the volume's title poem is one of her best, with its heavy, waterlogged portrait of the woman diver, her body clumsily armored for descent into the inchoate depth of new being, her courage sucking at the skin like black rubber...

...From the nonobjective symmetries of the painting, Ashbery develops a steadily more complex and digressive meditation on the nature of esthetic reality, on ideal beauty and dreams, on the links between the illusions of time and the experience of art...

...In most of the poems the vague cloud of unknowing that she calls God is alien, indifferent, elusive, untouchable, a mocking parody of life without death...

...his concrete and colloquial particulars tend to be crushed like reeds under the obliterating weight of his mandarin dialectic...

...And what marvelous freshness and wit he bestows on the drab forms...

...Much of the time, the diction and imagery have only the self-conscious, complacently purring tone of philosophic discourse, without a complementary hardness of thought, a mind set free from the gaping traps of experience...

...This yields to the young voices crowing their freedom, contemptuous of their elders...

...Not only are the number and variety of new poetry books a cause for wonder...

...Sexton picks and scratches at the bloody scabs of her anguish, keening a futile God that is only an unrealizable vision of herself as in this doomed marriage of Whitman and Blake: But I will conquer them all and build a whole nation of God in me-but united, build a new soul, dress it with skin and then put on my shirt and sing an anthem, a song of myself...

...remembered outings to "the miniature gaiety of seasides...

...Bemused by gallantry, we hear our mediocrities over-praised, indolence read as abnegation, slattern thought styled intuition, every lapse forgiven...

...All that remains for the living is concrete and tires and garbage "too thick-strewn/ To be swept up now...

...And he answers: Well, in my case, it's getting down on paper Not thoughts, exactly, but ideas, maybe: Ideas about thoughts...

...Some of the poems are little more than metered fragments of Leftist rhetoric ("I was trying to drive a tradition up against the wall" or, worse, "LeRoi...

...If such writing seems totally disengaged from any known recognizable life-Ashbery's, mine, yours, anyone's-the poetry of Philip Larkin, pared right down to the bone of his enclosed English context, forces us back into the clutches of old mortality...

...Yet they remain obdurately private and personal, and she knew it: "I have so much I want to say...

...Her images are stale and flat, the words screamed, not chosen...

...But "this clean-sliced cliff," which seems to press its busy weight against "The thought of dying," will always be defeated, for "nothing contravenes/The coming dark...

...John Ashbery, whose new collection is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 89 pp., $5.95), has an elegantly cool distaste for the literal uses of poetic language that are never questioned by Adrienne Rich or Anne Sexton...

...Poetry is both substance and subject, the poem itself being the philosophic ardor of the mind reaching for a divine geometry of luxuriant distinctions...

...Infatuated with the cunning intensities of abstraction, he writes of time rather than place, of the idea of personality rather than persons...

...POETS OF OUR TIMES BY PEARL K. BELL Surveying the tower of recently published volumes of poetry, I was almost tempted to conclude that there is today a vastly enlarged public for the work of serious poets...

...During these moments, when the frail voice inflects the pathos of defeat, we are held in the lean embrace of oblique disappointments, and the poem catches fire...

...The words are sometimes stretched into slogan balloons, spasms of rage sprayed on a wall: "Madness...

...some publishers have even adopted the admirably practical idea of issuing them simultaneously in hard-cover for libraries and in paper for everyone else, a boon to poets and their readers alike...

...to a frisson of stunned silence as he looks up at "The hardness and the brightness and the plain/Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare...

...Sexton's roil of feeling as she gropes for a holy order transmuted into the heightened language that is poetry...

...Suicide...

...In "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," though, she could be wittily relaxed about the lot of woman: Sigh no more, ladies...

...With her aggressively absolute commitment to radical feminism, she is geared to write leaflets, speeches-anything but poetry...

...By the late 1960s, the tense, articulate proprieties of her early work, with its undisguised homage to Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, had clearly become suspect, so much confining anachronism...

...Yet never is Mrs...

...Rather, through his fanatically clear-eyed intelligence, refining and defining the shards of ancestral memory and contemporary fact, he offers an extraordinarily powerful, if wholly unaggressive, kind of resistance-the unworldly but perfect triumph of imagination over the dry rot of despair...

...In "Leaflets," the world ("Che Guevara/Bolivia, Nanterre") is dragged in like an effigy of evil...

...Born in 1922, Larkin came of age in the War, whose catastrophes, he has said, "cut us ruthlessly down to size...

...Like his great mentor, Wallace Stevens, Ashbery passionately avows the "supreme fiction" of the human imagination, artificer of order in a godless world...

...In his third collection, High Windows (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 42 pp., $6.95), as in The Less Deceived and The Whit-sun Weddings (one small and dazzling book every 10 years), he writes with enormously concentrated, incandescent transparency about achingly intimate, precisely observed, familiar figures that fill him at once with parched despair and an affection so tainted with regret that it has all but been stifled...

...Thoughts is too grand a word...

...listen to us...

...In Larkin's vision, the white immensity of the hospital is a death's head that will in time devour us all...

...In a remarkable long poem, "The Building"-long for Larkin, that is, who spends words like a miser-he moves through the clacking mechanical modernity of a huge new hospital, marking the multifarious lives that shuffle unceasingly through the corridors, visiting, working, dying, a lonely crowd "at that vague age that claims/The end of choice, the last of hope...

...He fits with unresisting precision into traditional structures (and can also stand them hilariously on their heads), filling them with the melancholy truth of things in the shrunken, vulgarized and parochial England of the 1970s...

...Murder./Is there no way out but these...

...A tortured life snuffed out by early death can also inflate a poet's sales and reputation as no brilliant lyrical gifts on the cold white page could ever begin to do...

...And despite lines spoiled by the intransigent, untransformed rhetoric of a cause, the long poem "From a House in America" is a beautiful, ruminant elegy, powerfully somnolent in rhythm, about women and men, old houses and suicide, the endurance of grief in the act of survival...

...The obvious case, of course, is Sylvia Plath, who has been canonized by critics seduced by the symbolic drama of her suicide...

...In "As You Came from the Holy Land," he writes with guarded poignancy and regret of living "the history of someone who came too late," of the missed boats and chances, the day not seized, the secrets undeciphered, the might-have-been blankness "in the idea of what time it is/when time is already past...

...Content alone interests me,' he declares...

...At his best-when he chooses to be not the son of Stevens but a poet with an unmistakable sound of his own-Ashbery breaks away from the mannered sententiousness that so often causes his philosophic opacities to lie still-born on the page...

...From the opening of "Rowing" to the final "The Rowing Endeth," Mrs...

...Ideas is better, though not precisely what I mean...

...The present anthology covers seven books and a number of previously uncollected poems written over a 24-year period, beginning with the Yale Younger Poets volume, A Change of World, published in 1951, while Miss Rich was still at Radcliffe...

...Through the years, Miss Rich's subjects have moved from the graphically captured transiencies of a bewildered tourist in Europe to the graver burdens of responsibility enclosed in scenes from domestic life...

...In the perpetual renewals of the eternal present, Ashbery seems to conclude, can be found the supreme fiction of art, the imaginative inventions of man that replace the abandoned city of God...

...The evil she decries in the world beyond her anguished solipsism turns into the peep-show vulgarity of a horror movie, as in "After Auschwitz," where the imagery drawn from the Holocaust is too easy, in fact a desecration...

...Her posthumous collection, The Awful Rowing Toward God (Houghton Mifflin, 86 pp., $5.95), is sad reading, not only because the poems are haunted by the self-destruction that was to be their terrible climax, but because, however rending as cries of pain, they are never more than mediocre...

...The nurturing restraints of formal grace, so helplessly jettisoned by Anne Sexton, are rarely eschewed in Adrienne Rich's Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (Norton, 256 pp., $8.50), and then only when, as an embattled feminist, she hurls her words with such dogmatic glibness that they seem priggish and mean, closed off from her witty intelligence...

...What is writing...

...Since the death of Robert Frost, whose way of seeing was not unlike his own, Philip Larkin has had no American counterpart...

...In "Sad Steps," Larkin shifts with the speed of light from high-spirited mockery of romantic ecstasy over the moon ("Lozenge of love...

...Content is everything...

...Medallion of art!/O wolves of memory/ Immensements...

...He prefers the past, yet he is not sentimental...

...In the poems of her youth, which Auden praised for their neatness, modesty and candor, she had already begun to forge a language of her own, calculatedly bare and thoughtful, astonishingly free of the self-important virtuosity that often disfigures the efforts of the gifted young...

...But in the final quatrain, age and youth and all their loose words are subsumed by a terrifying stare into the unconsoling void: Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless...

...The long and labyrinthine title poem takes its point of departure from the Parmigianino self-portrait reflected in a convex, slyly distorting mirror...

...Almost invariably, Ashbery's lines gravitate like moons to the brocade corroborations, the superbly hand-wrought loops and arcs and carved bridges of abstraction that elevate his metaphysical dreaming high above the rudely specific, the named and known ordinariness of objects, places and men...

...Written from the extreme knife-edge of self-slaughter, these last poems of Anne Sexton are festering wounds, alarm bells of unbearable pain...

...And because he writes with anguished lucidity, Larkin is not only admired by the critics of Great Britain, he is bought and read by the thousands...

...There are less macabre moments in High Windows: a country fair, with its ritualistic gift of "regenerative union...

...Indeed, throughout the work of her 20s and 30s she was curiously obsessed by middle age, as in the sharply realized "Autumn Equinox,' with its mood of unquiet resignation...

...Not for him the grand gestures of Robert Lowell and Dylan Thomas, the visionary ego of Yeats, the formal revolutions of Eliot and Pound...

...the poet asks in "Ode to Bill...

...Eldridge...

...What sustains Larkin, this bleak and wintry spirit, is not the cozy backward glance to a better, smaller, greener England...

...In the title poem of High Windows he opens with an old man's resentful but wondering envy of permissive youth: When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives...

...Long stretches of "Self-Portrait" read like the bland prose of an uninspired scholar, complete with references and quotations...

...The poems from Diving Into the Wreck, published in 1973, are looser still, and more programatic...

...In the end, the ideas evoked by the canvas converge in celebration of that law outside each particular artist ("This otherness, this/'Not-being-us'") which deflects his hand in a direction, for a purpose, he never consciously thought to follow...

...Time is male and in his cups drinks to the fair...

...But the words aren't good enough...

...Throughout the stately intellectual choreography of the title poem, however, this never happens...

...Bleached of feeling and poetic surprise, the words gasp for air, stutter, go dead...

...Sylvia Plath's friend Anne Sexton, one of the most extravagantly praised confessional poets of the past decade, committed suicide last October, and is clearly fated for a similar hagiography...

...Alas, upon closer inspection it turns out that the collections being so ardently devoured by the common reader just now seem mainly to be those either of feminists read for their message, not their talent, or of confessional writers esteemed more for their sensational private lives than, such as it may be, their art...

...Erica Jong's forthcoming Loveroot is the first volume of poetry ever selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, for example, and one doesn't need much acumen to figure out that what is being anointed is not the poetry but a raunchy personality apotheosized by the media...

...and the nostalgic pathos of "Going, Going," with its lamentation for a vanished England of "The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,/The guildhalls, the carved choirs...