Books: After-Dinner Poetry

NIGHT THOUGHTS (282 pp.)—Edmund Wilson—Farrar, Sfraus ($4.50).

Of all the writers in America today, Edmund Wilson is probably the most versatile and certainly the most cosmopolitan. When Doctor Zhivago appears, he points out where the translators betrayed the Russian original. When the Dead Sea Scrolls are published, he learns Hebrew, the better to assess their value. Wilson is a man of letters at home, it would seem, in all civilizations, and the U.S.’s only critic committed to nothing but his good taste.

Flexibility and detachment make the true strength of a critic. But in a poet, or at least all but the greatest, these qualities usually prove disastrous. Night Thoughts. Wilson’s collected poems and prose poems, is not the work of a great poet. Its chameleonic variousness, technical prestidigitation, and lack of direction disqualify it even as the work of a good poet. The total effect is a blur.

In form, the poems range from the most elaborate metrical experiments to Christmas-card doggerel. The language extends from recondite embroidery to rather heavy-handed colloquialism. But Wilson’s verse bears the mark of homelessness: it wants to break with the old topics and the exhausted diction, but it cannot get a foothold on the new. The very title of the volume is borrowed from the once-famous work of Edward Young, an 18th century poet, now, significantly, quite unreadable.

In some of Wilson’s longer poems, one seems to be reading the pompous Latin hexameters of a precocious college class poet, translated by himself much later into would-be lively English. Thus the verse manages to suffer simultaneously from “if youth but knew” and “if age but could.” Other poems become wearying concatenations of assonances and alliterations in esoteric meters. At best, Wilson achieves a kind of chirky colloquialism. A characteristic sample:

—So these the precepts are, my friends, The aging Wilson recommends: Beware of dogmas backed by faith; Steer clear of conflicts to the death; Keep going; never stoop, sit tight; Read something luminous at night. Such are the pearls of wisdom and poetry of the mature Wilson. The man and his voice are obviously cultured. So, alas, are the pearls.