Books: POETRY & CRITICISM

It was a dry season for poetry. No significant new voices pierced the shrill chirping of minor versifiers. What distinguished the year’s poetry most was the high ambitions of its practitioners: their attempt to carve verbal order from life’s chaos. Few succeeded.

One poet who perhaps came closest to succeeding was 68-year-old Wallace Stevens, a Hartford insurance man, in his latest book, Transport to Summer. W. H. Auden, an intellectual acrobat and a verbal magician, turned out 1947’s most discussed book of verse: The Age of Anxiety. This modern eclogue described a chance meeting of four paper-thin characters in a Third Avenue bar; its moral was ex-radical Auden’s glowing belief that worldly goods must be rejected. The verse itself was dexterous, bright but self-indulgent.

America’s poetic dean, Robert Frost, 72, published two books of verse: Steeple Bush and A Masque of Mercy. There were flashes in them both, but Frost’s best work seemed behind him.

Books of verse worth looking into: John Betjeman’s Slick But Not Streamlined, mildly satiric and pleasing pieces by a little-known Englishman; Stephen Spender’s Poems of Dedication, grave and moving but often prosy; Karl Shapiro’s Trial of a Poet, explorations into the relation of an isolated poet to an indifferent society.

There were also the numerous little volumes of verse; tangled, dry, pretentiously platitudinous, unnecessarily difficult, full of tags from Auden and Eliot.

The Fashionable Trails. Criticism flourished in 1947—at least in quantity. The very bulk of it was perhaps a reflection of the time’s aridity.

Many critical books followed the trails of current literary fashions. F. O. Matthiessen’s The James Family and The Notebooks of Henry James offered rich detail on a man who in the past three years has increasingly been regarded as America’s greatest novelist. Franz Kafka was brought to life in Max Brod’s biography and scalped in Paul Goodman’s Franz Kafka: His Prayer. By comparison, Edmund Blunden’s solid Shelley: A Life Story seemed a challenge to current taste.

Among books by U.S. critics were Van Wyck Brooks’s mellow The Times of Melville and Whitman; Edmund Wilson’s jarringly narrow-minded Europe Without Baedeker; Lloyd Morris’ genre pieces in Postscript to Yesterday. Welcome relief from the weedlike academicism that is choking American criticism were V. S. Pritchett’s urbane, pleasant but acute essays on English writers in The Living Novel.

And in a class by itself was Thomas Mann’s collected criticism, Essays of Three Decades: the monument to a life’s work.