Gifts Reserved for Age

...demanded W B Yeats in his 74th year For having outlasted his generation, he claimed to have learned that there is no such thing as "a finish worthy of the start " Few of our poets live long enough (at least as productive writers) to test Yeats' bitter wisdom Of the British poets of the Auden generation, only Stephen Spender is left In The30's and After Poetry, Politics, People, 1930's-1970's (Random House, 236 pp , $10 00) he has collected representative examples of his essays from those decades and has linked this miscellany with meditations on the special character of each era...

...Robert Penn Warren is also, in a sense, a survivor Still formidably productive in his 70's, his 12th book of verse, Now and Then (Random House, 75 pp , $8 95), bears witness to his unflagging imaginative energy Warren got his start in the Southern "Fugitive" movement of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate-a group reacting against industrial "progress," and fierce in defense of the vanishing rural life Warren defines the two sections of this new book as "Nostalgic" and "Speculative," showing that agrarian roots and metaphysical irony remain part of his bag of tricks However, the years have broadened his scope considerably What once seemed, on occasion, defensive, provincial, or mannered, has now become an authentic and natural voice "We often pray to God to let us have Truth," he observes in "When the Tooth Snaps Zing1" but adds with the authority of long experience, "It is more important to pray God to help us live with it Especially if your memory is not what it used to be ". That punchline is characteristic of Warren's mordant humor, a trait useful in deflating his impulse to write Larger Than Life In his poetry as in his novels, Warren is drawn to parables where each representative event or object is an archetypal symbol Now and Then contains examples of both the best and worst of this penchant for the mythic "Last Laugh," which recounts the loss of faith Mark Twain experienced after watching his father's autopsy, is a slick Freudian exercise Its very polish mars sincerity, and reeks of cleverness Here Warren exploits his taste for gothic horrors to the full By contrast, "Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth" is a beautiful example of Warren's ability to imbue I he actual with imaginative significance As a young man 1 he poet shot a hawk and mounted it, trying to recapture the position of the graceful flight that had moved him to violence Years later, finding it battered and motheaten, he decides to burn it with a pile of his books Hamlet and Rimbaud, those youthful Romantics, Milton's "Lycidus"-the elegy for a young poet, Warren's own college verse, and some pornography Without waiting to see whether or not the fire will glorify the hawk, he can simply pray that "in some dream or delusion" before his own end, I'11 see again the first small silvery swirl Spin outward and down ward from sky-height To bring me the truth in blood-marriage of earth and air-And all will be as it was In that paradox of unjoyful joyousness, Till the dazzling moment when I, a last time, must flinch From the regally feathered gasoline flare Of youth's poor, angry, slapdash, and ignorant pyre This poem's tension rests between the youth who wrecks to preserve beauty, and the old man who immolates what is tangible to recapture the fire of its essence Warren, alone among living poets, has reached the position of Yeats, who believed that since the motivating force of the young was embodied in physical drives, only the old could incarnate it in the imagination A creativity that once tended to scatter like buckshot in an infinity of digressions, a superfluity of ideas, is in this poem aimed directly Violence and death-standard props of the Southern Romantic-have been Warren's themes from the beginning, but he has, so to speak, learned to live with them...

...All will be in vain unless-unless what'' Unless/You realize that what you think is Truth is only/A husk for something else Which might/Shall we say, be called energy, as good a word as any " Energy in Warren's vocabulary amounts to a religious trope It is seen as a kind of spiritual exuberance, often painfully intense, that animates life with significance Now and Then stands not so much for past and present, or for sporadic events, as for a synthesis of origin and development in continuing activity-the superabundant force of Warren's artistry He is determined to have "a finish worthy of the start " One hesitates to grant he has achieved this only because there is no evidence that he is nearly finished...

...The result is neither a literary nor an historical chronicle, but rather an orientation of self against the background of events "I myself am, it is only too clear, an autobiographer," he remarks toward the close "I am not someone who can shed or disclaim his past This is not merely an admission, it is something I have here tried to emphasize in presenting these records I see pretty clearly that in this particular case-my own-of the self-discoverer, the ideological has been a trap into which I have too often fallen, and from which I have only saved myself by going back to my personal, as distinct from my public life " The material here included covers both extremes from such polemics as "I Join the Communist Party,' to private soliloquies from the famous "September Journal" on the break-up of Spender's first marriage His poetry has, likewise, been a Romantic mixture of political and private, oratorical and lyric...

...In prose and in verse, Spender's worst is exemplified by flat diction and strident assertions At best, he is a writer of considerable, albeit sporadic, metaphoric power, who believes that the artist can express something vital about his times, and that he incarnates in his work ideas that others feel yet cannot formulate This creed has seduced him into involvements that his friend, W H Auden, avoided membership in the Communist Party in the '30s, anti-Communist proselytizing in the '50s, magazine editing, participation in international writers' conferences, a preoccupation with the Zeitgeist Even today, Spender is merely aware of Au-den's dictum that a writer's efforts "are but the extensions of his powers to charm " He has not yet resigned himself, protestations to the contrary, to "the era of the posthumous ". Spender is most interested in exploring the tension between his rebellious generation and the previous one-alternately revered and resented-of T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence, and Yeats This earlier literary group tended toward conservatism, guarded their privacy, and in general opposed involvement in the sordid world of political action When E M Forster attended an international writers' conference in the '30s, it was "like lions walking the streets of Rome on the night preceding the Ides of March"-so exceptional did world events have to be to produce this violation of his reclusiveness In the book's most sustained essay, "Notes on Revolutionaries and Reactionaries" (written in the '50s), Spender contrasts the radicals of his generation, many of whom were killed in the War, with such conservatives as Eliot, Lawrence and Yeats, each in a different way drawn toward Fascism And he sadly contemplates the irony that the reactionaries" in their own lives, their own behavior and activity, their work put literature before politics" because "their first concern was to preserve the civilization without which, as they thought, neither past nor future literature could survive " The revolutionaries, on the other hand, allowed themselves "to be persuaded that civilization could only be saved by action the logical consequence of this attitude was to put writing at the service of necessity as dictated by political leaders " This essay is particularly acute in its examination of these issues since, in some sense, it represents Spender's own dual impulses as he veers between the socialist and private ideals in his life and work...

...In the concluding essay, Spender reaffirms his belief that the artist should function as "a voice which can speak for those who are silent " But the position no longer has ideological overtones The writer, of whatever persuasion, should be a voice for humanity, not causes Against Au-den's declamation that "Poetry makes nothing happen," he affirms with Shelley that, after all, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world " Stephen Spender from youth onward often affected the pose of the Romantic madman-enthusiastic, hypersensitive, possessed by extremes In old age he assumes a graceful humanism that gives his poetic insights a new serenity and seriousness...