On Poetry

...Anticipating Karl's scorn at the selection, he explains, If I had what hypocritical poetasters crocadilely whining call lucre and filthy, But man, and it takes a man to articulate the unpalatable truth, Means of support, if I had this and a little more, I would give you Leaves of Grass He concludes with the Whitmanesque admonition to "Fare out, Karl, on an afternoon's excursion, on a sixpenny unexplored uncharted road...

...Believing that this unrequited love destroyed her parents' marriage, the daughter concludes, "I could not grieve, but I think I was somewhat to blame...

...The correlation between "Mademoiselle's" pretense of being French and the German poet's struggle to render a French obscurist poem into his own language is not wholly successful—as with the jigsaw puzzle, pieces are missing—but the memoir is touching and evocative, and the reconstruction of Rilke's efforts is a masterpiece: the fluted nouns Made taller, lonelier than life By leaf carved capitals in the afterglow...

...the poignancy lies in the fact that the living cannot hear the dead...

...Her closest spirital affinity is with William Blake's "The Auguries of Innocence," and whether condemning a mother who murdered her baby to save it from the murderous hate in the world, or affirming her own Christian transcendentalism, she speaks as one with authority...

...Most of the poems are long and autobiographical...

...Gods decline and die, new ones are reborn, and everybody suffers from the same certainties and uncertainties...

...In "Yannina" (site of the court of the 19th-century Turkish despot, Ali Pasha), barbarities of the past are contrasted with a carnival tent where a magician performs "sawing the lady in half...

...Lost in Translation" attempts to fuse a childhood recollection of putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the help of his German governess, and a later failure to locate a Rilke translation of Valery's "Palme...

...And after rain A deep reverberation fills with stars...

...His seventh and latest volume, Divine Comedies (Atheneum, 136 pp., $8.95), is also his finest—witty, profound and benignly tolerant...

...Finally, however, with all the heavenly stages and cycles of reincarnation, the Other World is only too like our own...

...nonetheless, it is a tour de force of high comedy...

...Stevie Smith excels at parody, and can gently mock her fellow poets in their own voices...

...Even comic poets cannot be sure whether poetry is what heals us, or only a method of measuring our despair...

...But these occasional lapses are more than overcome by her general excellence...

...Now, five years after her death, this English spinster's Collected Poems (Oxford, 591 pp., $20.00), including the strange cartoons she doodled to accompany her work, should establish her reputation in America beyond the cult following she acquired during her lifetime...

...In one poem a baby complains, What folly it is that girls are always supposed to be In love with papa...

...Her writing ranges from nonsense verse, to biting satire of manners, to religious revelation, but all depend on the bitter knowledge that we laugh because otherwise life would be too painful...

...Webster's offers the usual smattering: "provoking mirth or humorous reflection," "ludicrous," "ironic," "applied to serious works whose purpose is to portray truth or life without leaving a painful or tragic impression...

...It is not so hard to imitate Whitman's peculiar rhetoric, but Miss Smith triumphantly captures his oversized compassion for popular editions, his own verse and money...

...The dead friends and poets who join Ephraim's seances serve the same purpose as the Rosicrucian "machinery" in Pope's "The Rape of Lock": They raise the trivialities of everyday life to the proportions of Epic...

...No less than Stevie Smith's shabby gentleman in the belfry, the voice from the Ouija board is the Muse, trying to reclaim through art what is lost: "For partings hurt although we dip the pain/ Into a glowing well—the pen I mean.' The ambiguity of syntax is deliberate...

...The second half of Divine Comedies is a verse novel, "The Book of Ephraim...

...Are we what it dreams/ And is a rude awakening overdue...

...Stevie Smith's gifts can degenerate into feyness, and when she abandons comedy she often becomes strident...

...The owlet umlaut peeps and hoots Above the open vowel...

...While mourners reminisce, "Poor chap, he always loved larking," and speculate, "it must have been too cold for him his heart gave way," he speaks: Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning...

...Ultimately, loss is redeemed through different kinds of translation, as the palm (both a piece from the jigsaw and the name of Valery's poem) "turns the waste/ To shade and fibre, milk and memory...

...We tend to associate comedy in poetry with extremes, Dante at one end of the spectrum and Ogden Nash at the other...

...For such pity and terror what response is there but poetry...

...No summary of the action could sound anything but ridiculous...

...It purports to reveal communications received by the poet and a companion, from a first-century Hellenistic Jew, now speaking from the Beyond through a Ouija board and watching them through a mirror...

...In either case, the poem lightly points to the fatal propensity of innocence to accept responsibility for acts beyond its control...

...Yet at its most sublime, comedy can reach a sexual or religious ecstasy—what Catherine Osgood Foster called "The Magic Wedding of the World...

...removed from it we hear only the music...

...Her deservedly famous "Not Waving But Drowning" is a dialogue between a corpse and his friends...

...A ragged Turk sleeping on the sidewalk is the Ottoman Empire, and Merrill muses, "In so many words, so many rhymes/ The brave old world sleeps...

...Is this a comic reversal of the Oedipal complex, or a psychological reaction formation against the guilt accompanying desertion...

...On Poetry THE COMIC STANCE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL There is much to admire in the poetry of Stevie Smith: her startling clarity of judgment, her sharp unsentimental vision, her unmistakable voice of brutal innocence...

...All things in time grow musical,' James Merrill writes, but he only grows more so...

...It wasn't the case with me I couldn't take to him at all But he took to me What a sad fate to befall A child of three...

...Dear Karl" takes the form of a letter from Walt Whitman, asking the recipient to accept a cheap edition of the poet's works...

...Not all of the poems here are equally successful...

...Not that she doesn't recognize the inextricable connection between poetry and economics (although her poems were printed in periodicals, she had to supplement her income by working in a magazine publishing firm...

...A poem exploring the conflict between devotion to one's art and the need to make a living, offers the following gloss: "A renegade poet, having taken to journalism for more money, is rebuked by his Muse in the form of an old gentleman...

...In the macabre tales she wrote, she was a child telling us the Emperor has no clothes...

...he cuts her throat...

...The answer, to our relief, is "Not in Yannina...

...Stevie Smith bears little resemblance to Dante and far transcends Nash (although in her early work one detects a superficial influence...

...The act is inspired by pity for the now unemployed Muse, as the former poet remembers with nostalgia, the soft tune Of the belfry bats moaning to find more room And the ding-dong of that imaginary sound Is as grateful as a fairy bell tolling by waters drowned Pain is the impetus of poetry...

...It reminds us, too, that she was that rarest phenomenon: a great comic poet...

...While Stevie Smith sees comedy as a cutting edge, Merrill uses it to deflect the blade...

...The poet cannot decide whether Ephraim really is a spirit or merely autoprojection...

...The definitions of comedy are diverse, since etymolo-gically the word derives from the ancient Greek for festive singing and merrymaking...

...Since First Poems (1951), he has shown remarkable wizardry with language and an easy command of traditional poetic forms...

...More to the point, William Congreve thought it "the business of the comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind," thus preparing us for the naked savagery of Swift...

...their theme is how memory is transformed into art...

...To ask that, though, is to ask whether inspiration is Divine or comes from within...