BOOKS
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT
COLLECTED POEMS 1929-1933
&
A HOPE FOR POETRY,
by
C. Day Leu;is. Random House.
$2.50.
Many of the things that could be said about Lewis's verse are said in
his essay,
A Hope for Poetry.
In this critical study Lewis examines the
background and outlook of the "post-war"
~chao!
of poets to which he
belongs. A number of the criticisms that he makes of Auden and Spender,
as well as of their predecessors, apply just as well to his own poems.
Oc·
casionally they apply too well; some of his negative comments, directed at
other verse writers, swing back at his own writings like a boomerang.
One of the chief themes which Lewis treats is the matter of literary
heritage, or of "ancestors" as his group calls it. He gives a good deal of
space to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who has been the most important in–
fluence upon the English post-war poets. His analysis of Hopkins's tech–
nical innovations is very useful in studying Lewis's own verse, for they
have affected his writing more immediately than· Auden's or Spender's.
The three long poem-sequences which make up Lewis's "collected" works
-Transitional Poem, From Feathers to Iron, The Magnetic Mountain–
have the same qualities as the texture of Hopkins's verse. Lewis experiments
with sprung-rhythm-a metre which, according to Hopkins, is not based
upon uniform feet of two or three syllables, but upon one stressed syllable
in each foot, accompanied by a number of unstressed syllables or by none
at all; and which approximates the rhythm of common speech, since it is
founded upon stress and not upon a mechanical succession of two or three
beat~.
He works even more constantly with the de ices of alliteration and
cross-assonance used by Hopkins. These devices are employed so effective–
ly in the first set of verses in
The Magnetic Mountain
that I should like
to reproduce the stanzas here-with italics to mark the internal assonance:
52
Now
to be with you, elate,
unshared,
My
kestrel
joy, 0
hoverer
in wind,
Over
the quarry furiously at
rest
Chaired
on shoulders of shouting wind.
Where's
that unique one, wind and wing
married,
A loft
in contact of earth and
ether,·
Feathery
my comet, Oh too often
From heav'n
harried
by carrion
cares.
No
searcher
may hope to flush that
fleet
one
Not to be
found
by gun or
glass,
In old habits,
last
year's
hunting-ground,
whose
beat
is wind-wide, whose
perch
a split second.
