America in "Metres"

...I can see that my intervention is required,/The more urgently as your prospects alter and disappear," this fanatic proclaims to scattered Americana...

...His words were heard by the young Walt Whitman, and soon the hopeful prophesy was being fulfilled by a vital home-grown poetic tradition...

...A more important influence is that first magisterial transatlantic exile, Henry James: "Some of the urban poetry James catches out of thecorner of his eye, as it were, often contains the kind of detail out of which Williams would construct an entire poem...

...Small wonder, then, that he seized every opportunity to visit the United States, to meet many of the poets he had admired from afar, and to see for himself the American scenery that had shaped their art...

...Still, Crase's outlook remains hopeful, and even here he forsees the possibility of valid new forms...

...The subjects of Some A mericans are the artists who made Tomlinson feel, for the first time, "part of a small clan...

...Tomlinson also pays tribute to the more remote presences of Georgia O'Keeffe, whose paintings altered modern ways of seeing, and to Pound-the patriarch of modernism...

...It was, he notes, "an unpropitious time to write the kind of verse that interested me, and England an unpropitious place in which to publish it...

...Titles such as "Six Places in New York State" or "Great Fennville Swamp" might suggest Currier & Ives prints translated into verse, but Crase's real goal is to restore America to its original beauty-if only he can discover what that would look like...

...In addition to Moore, the group included Ivor Winters, William Carlos Williams and two other original founders of the "objectivist" school, George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky...

...Pretty self-conscious, I should say," sniffed a roommate with whom Tomlinson tried to share his enthusiasm for Marianne Moore's "The Steeple-Jack...

...Loosestrife, the purple filler At the low end of the field, came vagabonding In the wool of distant English sheep and docked A t a Hudson River factory and now the Japanese Lady's thumb, having arrived as a stowaway With the china, packed in straw, is deftly Fulfilling its version of manifest destiny...

...As you are dispersed./Return and inhabit me...

...Thus the central voice in Douglas Crase's The Revisionist (Little, Brown, 83 pp., $5.95...

...He is reminded that O'Keeffe and Pound were inspired by the work of the American Orientalist, Ernest Fenellosa...

...Tomlinson was a sorrowful spectator of their growing misunderstanding of each other's work, a situation all the more poignant to him because" from both their windows in Brooklyn they had shared the view of the same 'lighthouse'?-the beam from the statue [of Liberty] shining back in the dusk toward the windows of Manhattan...

...The motion that finds you, the motion that you were...

...The Federal fanlight opens in the sun./And on the gateleg table is a treaty to be signed...

...The Continent as the Letter M" shows Crase able to take on not only Walt's expansiveness but the musicality of Wallace Stevens as well...

...This mammoth that holds us between its knees...

...No less tellingly, the silence of the aging Pound during a chance encounter at the Spoletto Festival in 1967 is an emblem of the enigma of that poet's last years...

...Maumee, Menominee, Michilimackinac, Deep, past Appalachian deep The inarticulate lives in us hold on me...

...Out of this disappointment, however, comes the realization that America is constantly renewing itself...

...Taking this as exemplary, Tomlinson sees the American poetic tradition less as a paragon for Europeans than a force liberating the old world's imagination toward its boundless spiritual vistas...

...Like Tomlinson, Crase has a painter's eye and embodies his ideas in landscapes...

...Ralph Waldo Emerson, while lamenting this parasitic tendency, nevertheless declared confidently that "America is a poem in our eyes...

...Having found his poetic voice, he has settled down at the quintessentially British address of Ozleworth Bottom, Wotton-under-Edge...

...In one section of the long title poem, he catalogues his methods for righting sundry wrongs: Asphalt parking lots will be torn up to restore lost buildings, inter-states scribbled across the plains will be erased, foreign trees (and their blights, like Dutch elm disease) will be deported, and European art treasures will be sold to buy back American paintings in museums abroad...

...He missed this quality in the neometaphysical followers of Eliot and Auden, still favored by the British literary establishment...

...America Began in Houses," for example, traces the Colonial architectural style from its inception to its debased revival in modern subdivisions...

...Tomlinson is content to record Pound's behavior without guessing whether it is sagacity or senility...

...The restoration proves to be even more difficult than it first appears, for our native land is not easily separated from its hidden foreign ties...

...Despite his attraction to American poetry, Tomlinson decided not to make his home here...

...A few lines from Ezra Pound, discovered in a Faber verse anthology, were what initially propelled Tomlinson in the direction of "that unknown quantity, American art...

...That Crase's invocation of the Whitmanian poetic tradition can be so powerful after all these years of overuse and abuse is a small miracle of revisionism itself...

...In the end, the poet transcends his own grudges to conclude that "Although the past/Seems to be level in its place there's room for more/And the ragged additions polish the previous days...

...Crase creates dramatic tension by concentrating on the fluid interplay between history and our changing perspective on it...

...He concludes his account of Some A mericans with James and Pound in Italy, where they left "a ponderable impression in the literate Italian mind" and helped its modern writers rediscover the glories of their own past...

...In the second half of Some Americans, Tomlinson tries to cast that beam on the origins and unifying sources of America's artistic strengths...

...The Revisionist is a remarkable first book of poems, an audacious attempt to put Emerson's poem that is America into "metres...

...little of it had been published in Britain, and that was mostly uncharacteristic...

...This quest carries him to the "enfiladed mesas commanding their orange, juniper-stippled spaces" of Abiquiu, a place of Asian starkness and simplicity...

...The heat of the fires/Which burned over your logged-out heart released/The seed of the jack pine and gave it a delayed/But native start...

...Now, in Some A mericans (California, 127 pp., $10.95), the British poet and painter Charles Tomlinson charts his own "mental emigration" from "that suffocation which has affected so much English art ever since the death of Byron" to the fresh air of our land of poetic liberty...

...These have combined so I may never untangle Their effects...

...He immediately recognized the house he was seeking in Abiquiu, New Mexico, when he spotted "a gateway adorned by an immense deer skull complete with branching antlers...

...It brought to mindO'Keeffe'spainting.From the Faraway Nearby, where the sky is filled with a horned floating skull, behind it the empty blue, and bare desert hills beneath...

...For a student at Cambridge in 1945, modern American poetry was unmapped territory...

...its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres...

...Though once the conversation among the rest of us had taken fire and no one was looking at him, he began to examine each face with minute scrupulousness, losing not a word as he leaned forward, picking avidly at the skin on the palm of his left hand...

...Perhaps that is why the image speaks louder than any description of the late poet I have read...

...Eventually, Tomlinson became intimately involved in the circle of Oppen and Zukofsky, although the artistic fellowship that so encouraged the Englishman operated less powerfully between the two American poets...

...He uses both to capture the spirit ol America's "ample geography": So many centuries thicken its animal sound...

...But Moore's austerity opened Tomlinson's eyes to "a kind of probity possible in verse for which seemli-ness would be no bad description...

...Bemused to discover that the very ground of America, not merely its people, partakes of melting-pot pluralism, the poet despairs of ever recapturing the primal continent...

...If I could raise rivers, I'd raise them/Across the mantle of your past: old headwaters/Stolen, oxbows high and dry while new ones form,/A sediment of history rearranged...

...The poet laments that "together," I thought we were having an honest childhood Of daisies, dandelions and Queen Anne's lace Only to discover these come wrapped tightly In the same colonial history as my own...

...An heir of Pound, Moore, Stevens must inevitably appear an odd fish in English waters...

...In keeping with the objectivist credo, "No ideas but in things," Tomlinson conveys the essence of his experiences through details...

...Strangely, as the pilgrim/Aspirations increase they seem to diminish in promise/Yet who can say that out of these borrowed fashions/Won't cornea suburban mutant enlarging nature/Once again...

...He sat concentratedly engaged in removing every particle of ice cream from the bottom of his dish with a plastic spoon...