Books: E Pluribus Duo

SELECTED POEMS—Allen Tate—Scribner ($2).

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR & OTHER POEMS—Wallace Stevens—Knopf ($2).

Unlike dissatisfied Europe, which produces communists and anarchists in national hotbeds, American dissatisfaction produces protestants in sectional cold-frames. And unlike the run of U. S. protestants, who protest only against any interference with their consumption of daily bread, many U. S. poets protest that that daily bread is so full of holes that it is more like daily starvation. Some of them, to get more literary nutrition, have gone to Europe: Missourian T. S. Eliot lives in England; Idahoan Ezra Pound lives in Italy. Others who have remained at home, as Robert Frost* and the late Vachel Lindsay, have managed on their starvation rations to work out a poetry that presents pinched versions of reality recognizable to other protestant Americans. Still others, fed up with starvation, if not with protest, chew on the stringent cud of their inner man. Among U. S. poets who chew nutritious cuds are Southern Classicist Allen Tate and Northern Romantic Wallace Stevens.

Tate. “As a poet, I have never had any experience . . . as a poet, my concern is the experience that I hope the reader will have in reading the poem. The poet as seer who experiences life in behalf of the population is a picture that is not clear in my mind, but it is an interesting picture; it happens to be one with which I have no sympathy at all.” So does Poet Allen Tate of Tennessee, with a schoolmasterish delight in heckling his audience, conclude the preface to his Selected Poems. These poems, true to their foreword, dish up in lieu of loaves of poetry no dough-balls of life. Strict, acute, circuitous, Poet Tate’s verses invite their readers to the unveiling of a literary brain.

It is moot whether there be divinities

As I finish this play by Webster:

The streetcars are still running however

And the katharsis fades in the warm

water of a yawn.

In publishing his own selection of his poems Author Tate places his latest works first. Readers who reverse that order will find his book more readily comprehensible, will find that few books better illustrate the professional literate’s magpie-like stealing of twigs off literature’s genealogical tree, his pupa-like spinning, out of a bowel-deep terror of extinction, pessimism’s tight and tolerably comfortable cocoon. Irritating to some ears will be Author Tate’s attempts, in many of his poems, to catch the tone of T. S. Eliot’s latter-day concord of sourness and light. But in the presentation of his central themes, the Civil War and life’s mortal idiocy, Poet Tate, verging in his later poems on the first-rate, speaks in his own tones.

. . . All are born Yankees of the race of

men

And this, too, now the country of the

damned:

Poor bodies crowding round us! The

white face

Eyeless with eyesight only, the modern

power—

Huddled sublimities of time and space,

They are the echoes of a raging tower

That reared its moment upon a gone

land

Pouring a long cold wrath upon the

mind—

Damned soids, running the way of

sand

Into the destination of the wind!

Readers, whether North or South, whose minds still re-echo Poet Tate’s cold wrath at the thought of the Civil War, will be grateful that that war is over, that Poet Tate is not.

Stevens. As distinct from Author Tate’s poems, which conduce to the racking of brains in private, the brilliant poetry of Wallace Stevens will likely seem to conduce to the twirling of canes in public. When Poet Stevens, in his latest book, opens a poem on proletarianism (A Duck for Dinner) with the lines

The Bulgar said, “After pineapple with fresh mint

We went to walk in the park; for, after all,

The workers do not rise, as Venus rose, Out of a violet sea. . . .”

readers will feel disposed thenceforward to expect the unexpected and little else. Those, however, who are familiar with Poet Stevens’ work in Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1936) will be aware that this poet, affecting a cockeyed exterior in deference to the world as he sees it, maintains a highly organized inward poise in deference to the world as he knows it. What that knowledge amounts to receives its latest, completest totalizing in The Man with the Blue Guitar.

In one group of poems, which gives the book its title, and in a complementary group, Owl’s Clover, Poet Stevens goes to the mat with the torture of living in two worlds at once. The ensuing struggle is one which readers will recognize as of immediate importance. Sometimes Poet Stevens seems to be trying less to reach truth than to give it a jocular succession of last tags:

A lady dying of diabetes

Listened to the radio,

Catching the lesser dithyrambs.

So heaven collects its bleating lambs.

Sometimes he seems to be on the way to calling off the game with a last-tag to his own jocularity:

Things as they are have been destroyed.

Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold?

Is my thought a memory, not alive?

And once Poet Stevens, as single arbiter and both contestants in his highly contemporary civil war, succeeds in arriving at a peace that few will protest:

Poetry is the subject of the poem,

From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,

Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,

Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it

An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun’s green,

Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that

thinks.

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,

In the universal intercourse.

*But to achieve literary recognition, Frost had to go to England (1912-15), published his first two books there (A Boy’s Will, North of Boston).