Books: Nine and Two

During the last three months, to the almost complete indifference of 130 million Americans, some 25 books of poems have been published in the U. S.

TIME takes these books seriously. As TIME sees it, poets acknowledge a responsibility which sooner or later every human being must acknowledge. That responsibility, stated in its humblest form, is to make words make sense: stated in its most ambitious form, it is to make words make complete sense. Twentieth-Century poets have had a hard time trying to make their 20th-century words make sense, but that was their responsibility. Either they could live up to it, and be poets; or pretend to live up to it, and be poetasters; or ignore it, and be poeticules.

TIME, recognizing this perennial responsibility of poets, recognizes also its own journalistic responsibility to name poets poets, poetasters poetasters, and poeticules poeticules. For the poets’ effort to make words make sense is an effort to make the thing on which all human communication—letter-writing, conversation, journalism, literature—ultimately depends. To the extent that poets fulfill their poet-hood they are making human communication more possible. To the extent that poets lapse into poetastiness or poeticulosity they are perverting or muddling human communication.

TIME, in reporting on contemporary poetry, aims to publish, as impartially as it can, this constant news: that poets have aresponsibility of major importance to everybody, which individual poets are fulfilling, evading or ignoring in varying degrees.

Probably the most difficult and at the same time the most lucid of present-day poets is Laura Riding. Manhattan-born, Laura Riding at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was settled in Mallorca, where, with Robert Graves, she published books of the Seizin Press. Forced to leave the island at a few hours’ notice, she is now living in Brittany until Mallorca returns to its normal ways. An indefatigable worker, she has written nine books of poetry, six of criticism, a novel. This month her Collected Poems (Random House, $4) was published in the U. S.

As a poet committed to the task of making words make sense, Laura Riding prefaces her poems with one of the most straightforward yet complete declarations of a poet’s purpose yet published. “A poem is an uncovering of truth of so fundamental and general a kind that no other name besides poetry is adequate except truth. . . . Truth is the result when reality as a whole is uncovered by those faculties which apprehend in terms of entirety, rather than in terms merely of parts. The person who writes a poem for the right reasons has felt the need of exercising such faculties, has such faculties. The person who reads a poem for the right reasons is asking the poet to help him to accentuate these faculties, and to provide him with an occasion for exercising them.” In spite of this illuminating introduction, readers will still find her poems difficult. The main difficulty for U. S. readers will probably be that she writes in a language in which every word carries its fullest literate meaning. For this reason, language that would seem clear in Shakespeare or Mother Goose may seem obscure in Laura Riding:

. . . the public pomp and private woes

Of social nature, crossed estate

Where reason’s loud with nonsense

And nonsense soft with truth—

A reader who expects these poems “to evoke in him the flattering sensation of understanding more than he knows” will soon be dashed. But a reader who approaches these poems as literal communications may at length understand them. Readers, says Laura Riding, are accustomed to the kind of poetry written in what she calls “a tradition of male monologue.” Laura Riding’s poems are no monologues: they are direct communications of personal knowledge from herself to the reader. These poems make such unfaltering sense that most readers’ attention will falter before them.

THE MAP OF PLACES

The map of places passes.

The reality of paper tears.

Land and water where they are

Are only where they were

When words read “here” and “here”

Before ships happened there.

Now on naked names feet stand,

No geographies in the hand,

And paper reads anciently,

And ships at sea

Turn round and round

All is known, all is found.

Death meets itself everywhere.

Holes in maps look through to nowhere.

By such signs and tokens, this book, for an English-speaking person marooned in the middle of the 20th Century, would be the book of books for him to have along.

Robinson Jeffers, California’s unofficial laureate, this month published his Selected Poetry (Random House, $3.50). In its foreword he stated his poetic creed. He declared that “poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things.” His work at its best does give an impression of the emptiness of the American continent, an emptiness which the continent fills with (relatively) permanent things like forests, mountains, rivers and 130 million people, and which Jeffers, for the most part, fills with mythological personages, semi-scientific platitudes, nonpoetical intensities, and—for the pay-off—mental exhaustion.

The poet as well

Builds his monument mockingly . . .

Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found

The honey of peace in old poems.

Because his words are impersonally grandiose instead of personally grand, Robinson Jeffers, who in another place and another time might have been a prophet, is here & now a vasty poetaster.

Situated on a ridge of rock that rises above the Passaic, N. J. meadows is the suburban town of Rutherford. Rising above the dead level of contemporary U. S. poetry is William Carlos Williams, one of the town’s busiest doctors. A worshiper of beauty and music in a town that is short on both, he jots down poems in any free moment that his medical practice affords. Last month appeared his Complete Collected Poems (New Directions, $3). Unlike the run of poets, Williams does not use his poetry as an escape from his cramped environment, but as a code in which to express its unregarded beauties.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Such characteristically gay and hopeless verses are likely to make plain readers suspect that Williams has more up his sleeve than his poems express. Dr. Williams invites this suspicion by using a new-fangled code to express a primitive notion of beauty. For so doing, he ranks as predominantly a poetaster.

Simply give away your beauty

without talk and reckoning.

You are still. She says for you; I am.

And comes in meaning thousandfold,

at last comes over everyone.

This literal translation from the late German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke gives a crude but not misleading idea of Rilke’s utter reliance on beauty as a human achievement that needs no advertising. No greater justification for Rilke’s reliance could be found than the spirit in which his translator, M. D. Herter Norton, has done Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Norton, $2.50). In Translator Norton’s foreword, she explains with noteworthy clarity that although all of a poem is lost in translation, no real poem can ever really be lost. In translation or out, and despite the drift in some of his later poems toward mixing beauty and religiosity, Rilke is a real poet.

In contrast to Rilke, Frederic Prokosch relies on nothing but Prokosch. But on close examination, most readers will find Prokosch to be unreliable. An Austrian-American, instructor at Yale, Frederic Prokosch has written two novels (The Asiatics, The Seven Who Fled) which tickled occidental yogi-men. An able verbal fakir, Prokosch, by playing solemn tricks with the sounds of words, makes his poems bloom like a fakir’s mango tree.

And through this foliage trickles the hinting smile

Of daybreak bringing delight to the opening eyelids

Of mortals: men the reflective, and also

The lynx, the condor, the smooth persimmon.*

The Carnival (Harper, $2), his second book of fluid, fashionable verses, marks him an already accomplished poetaster.

A more transparent poetaster is Joseph Auslander. His poetical surfaces hide nothing. His complete visibility has attracted popular attention, and has brought him official recognition, in the shape of an appointment as consultant in English poetry for The Library of Congress. His latest book of rousing, rhythmical lyrics, Riders at the Gate (Macmillan, $1.75), his eighth and his best, is a simon-pure example of poetical swaggering.

As much as a woman can, Kay Boyle swaggers too. St. Paul-born, expatriate since 1922, now settled in Megeve, France, Kay Boyle is one of the more uncomfortably brilliant short-story writers andnovelists. In October she published her first book of poems, A Glad Day (New Directions, $2). Kay Boyle would have been considered a clever person in any age, except one in which cleverness outlived itswelcome. Kay Boyle herself suspects as much:

This is the time of a dark winter in the heart

but in me are green traitors.

In spite of her cleverness, she never really owns her treachery; in consequence, her brilliance dissipates itself in smarting, useless pictures:

. . . Jesus like a butterfly

with his arms pinned open and his legs

braided up with pain.

Because such images are her best accomplishment, Kay Boyle takes rank as a vivid poetaster.

Merrill Moore, like William Carlos Williams, is a doctor who also professes poetry. A rich, restless Boston psychiatrist who likes long-distance swimming and long-distance sonnet-writing, Merrill Moore has written so many sonnets (50,000) that he habitually thinks in blocks of 14 lines. Since his 18th year he has written an average of five sonnets a day, and as many as 100 in four hours. This month he published a few of them: M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets (Harcourt, Brace, $5).

His book is less a collection of poems than a clinical exhibition. Its stated purpose is to make not words, but Merrill Moore, make sense. Accordingly, though the book occasionally and happily deviates from its stated purpose, most readers will count Merrill Moore neither poet, poetaster nor poeticule, but a scientist drunk with words.

Genevieve Taggard, teacher (at Sarah Lawrence College), biographer (of Emily Dickinson), editor (of The Measure, a magazine of verse) last month published her Collected Poems (Harper, $2.50). With her rich literary background and varied social experience, she writes as one who feels that she is expected to say something rich and varied. Her poems are stopgaps for silence—what their author apparently feels would be an embarrassing silence. But since silence speaks louder than stopgaps, her poems give a net impression of saying nothing. Her lyrics, whether addressed to Nature or to Man, all share the same insufficiency. All are the work of a worried, earnest, poetical nondescript.

Donald Davidson, 45, is a Tennessean, professor of English at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, a leading member of the Southern agrarians (Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, et al.). Like the rest of those resolute, nostalgic patriots, he believes that the thread of U. S. destiny was lost somewhere in the tangle of the Civil War. As citizens the agrarians think they can tie that thread into modern life, as poets they feel that the thread has gone for good. In Lee in the Mountains (Houghton Mifflin, $2), a book of short narrative poems, Davidson’s heroes are dead men, whose heroism he tries toembalm in lifelike verses. Sample (on Andrew Jackson’s statue in Nashville):

In bronze he rides, saluting James K. Polk,

His horse’s rump turned to us in the smoke.

Despite Donald Davidson’s sincerity and competence, his attempts to revive a live present by hypodermic injections of a dead past are poeticulous.

There is nothing of the dead past about Kenneth Fearing. This month he published his third book of poems, Dead Reckoning (Random House, $1.25). Kenneth Fearing, in his 29 free-verse lyrics, writes about now and his anger is now:

Not the saga of your soul at grips with fate, bleedingheart, for we have troubles of our own . . .

not all the answers, oracle, to politics and life and love, you have them but your book is out of date no,

nor why you are not a heel, smooth baby, for that is a lie, nor why you had to become one, for that is much too true . . .

nor how cynical you are, rumpot, and why you became so Give us instead, if you must, something that we can use, like a telephone number. . . .

Because practically the only energy in his words comes from anger, Kenneth Fearing is a poeticule—a poet, because his words are so brimful of anger they leave no room for hate.

Of these eleven writers, nine seem to help define the word poet, two—one living and one dead—make the word poet make sense.

* Prokosch doubtless meant to write “opossum,” doubtless did not think of it.