Books: Poets Old & New

AMARANTH—Edwin Arlington Robinson—Macmillan ($2).

POEMS—Stephen Spender—Random House ($1.50).

POEM—W. H. Auden—Random House ($2.50).

Modern poetry, like experimental science, is always precocious to its day. Even William Wordsworth was once a misunderstood modern, a reprehensible revolutionary. Edwin Arlington Robinson, who last week published his eighth quiet narrative poem, was never considered a blasphemer of the literary gods, but once he was more modern than he is today. Now distinctly a member of the old guard, thrice crowned with the perishable bays of the Pulitzer Prize (1922, 1925, 1927). Robinson is by long odds the most respected living U. S. poet. In his 65th year this New England Browning still turns out a lengthy blank-verse narrative that seems sometimes garrulous but never silly; though his poetic fire is down to a low blue flame, it is not yet extinguished. Fed by no fiercely burning faith but well banked with the coke of agnostic irony, it may well flicker along through many another winter.

Like other Robinson narratives, Amaranth is a tale of moral issues. This time the scene is set in a shadowy country not unlike a New England intellectualization of Hell. It is the place to which men are condemned who inhabit “the wrong world”—preachers who should have been lawyers, businessmen who should have been artists. Principal figure is a mediocre painter who escaped from “the wrong world” by becoming a pump-manufacturer (“a spring-clean unimpeachable pump-builder”), then somehow relapsed. Saved from suicide and other tempting methods of flight by the mysterious figure of Amaranth, a symbolic embodiment of conscience, the erstwhile painter watches fate overtake the other inhabitants, eventually wins his release from the accursed country. Total effect of Amaranth is typically Robinsonian: a shadow masque seen through a glass darkly, by a keen but puzzled eye.

Between Poet Robinson and Poets Spender and Auden lies the gulf of the War. Much murmured of late by the literati, these two new names were last fortnight introduced to a U. S. audience. Tories in their own country (England) have already damned them as bumptious poetasters. To plain readers, who find Poet Robinson’s verbal sinuosities occasionally obscure, they may appear largely unintelligible. But youthful amateurs of poetry will con them with interest, sometimes with enthusiasm. Their elders will not be quick to applaud either their language or their sentiments: both grate harshly on a pre-War ear.

Of the two, Stephen Spender writes verse that more nearly approximates what has been traditionally known as poetry; even Catos will clap his lines to a dead airman:

He will watch the hawk with an indifferent eye

Or pitifully;

Nor on those eagles that so feared him, now

Will strain his brow;

Weapons men use, stone, sling and strong-thewed bow

He will not know.

This aristocrat, superb of all instinct,

With death close linked

Had paced the enormous cloud, almost had won

War on the sun;

Till now, like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned,

Hands, wings, are found.

But only readers who share the poet’s indignation will sympathize with the deliberate lunatic ugliness of the poem on Van der Lubbe, the Dutch idiot executed by the Nazis for the Reichstag fire.

Less lyric than his fellow-poet, Auden writes with more explicit scorn of “the old gang,” dedicates his book with the forthright sentiment:

Let us honor if we can

The vertical man

Though we value none

But the horizontal one.

Both Auden and Spender are speakers for a generation that is sated with the old order, hungry for the new chaos. Poet Robinson writes on the assumption that the proper study of the poet is the inner man, and in his poems he soliloquizes with sad coherence on the tangled emotional morals of a static mankind. Poets Auden and Spender are fiercely, often incoherently impatient of all that. Poet Robinson is a calm skeptic; they, passionate disbelievers. More satirical, less serious a poet than Spender, Auden half-fills his book with prose patches: a mock oration, an airman’s journal, geometrical figures, a parody litany. Most observable emotion in Auden is scorn: of those round-table experts “lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down”; of complacent citizens of “England, this country of ours where nobody is well”; of such tycoons as newspaper-owning Lord Rothermere—Beethameer, Beethameer, bully of Britain, With your face as fat as a farmer’s bum. . . .

The Authors. Because they are poets, Robinson, Spender and Auden are not typical citizens of their respective countries. Old Poet Robinson, Maine-born, Harvard-bred, chose the uncrowded profession of poet at an early age. Establishing himself in Manhattan “in a sordid stall on the fifth floor of a dreary house,” he kept himself and Pegasus fed by doing odd jobs, was once a construction inspector on the subway. Only U.S. poet ever reviewed by a U.S. President, Robinson got more attention when Theodore Roosevelt wrote an encomium of his poetry in the Outlook, and offered him a consulship in Mexico. Robinson declined the consulship, accepted a job in the New York Customs House, which he kept until his royalties grew big enough to support him. A shy, scholarly bachelor, he spends his winters in Boston and Manhattan, his summers at the MacDowell Colony, Peterboro, N. H., where he is the most distinguished oldtimer.

Young Poets Wyant Hugh Auden and Stephen Spender, both in their 20’s, were contemporaries at Oxford. Each dedicates his book to one Christopher Isherwood. Auden “went down” from Christ Church in 1928, is now teaching at a school near Malvern. Spender left the university three years later, after failing his degree. With an independent income, he can afford to be a professed poet, is at present working on a study of the relation of contemporary writing to political movements and a poetic drama, The Death of a Judge.