BOOKS
But
surely
will meet him,
late
or
soon,
Who
turns
a corner into new territory;
Spirit
mating
afresh shall
discern
him
On the world's noon-top
purely
poised.
Void
are the valleys, in town no
trace,
And
dumb
the
dy-dividing
hills:
Swift outrider of
lumbering
earth
Oh hasten hither my kestrel
joy!
53
with a slight variation in the fourth stanza, the rhyme scheme is uniformly
-by
line-ab, cd, de, ba.
As a whole these technical stunts are handled with great dexterity.
They are quite unobtrusive: you don't know they are there, until you
stop to pick: them out. At least in these verses, one may say of Lewis what
he says of Hopkins-that the technical tricks are "indistinguishable from
the pattern which they help to create."
In dealing with the literary
1
heritage of the new English poets, Lewis
divides verse writers into two classes: "those who assimilate a number of
influences and construct an original speech from them, and those whose
voice seems to come out of the blue, reminding us of nothing we have
heard before." I think he is wrong in placing Spender in the second
category; but Lewis unquestionably belongs to the first. And even the
second type of poet does not lack what Lewis calls "poetical self-conscious–
ness," for such an author has a "close acquaintance with other poets, dead
and living," even though he "remains as a poet almost untouched by them."
The intense feeling which the young English poets have for "ances–
tors" is hard to find in recent American verse. Particularly since the war
period, the tendency in American poetry of the social type has been to
decry the first class of writing as mere imitation, to repudiate literary
influence as mere bookishness. In addition to this barrier, which has been
set up as a result of the peculiar national d·evelopment of our letters, a
class wall has been built by proletarian authors between themselves and
preceding literature. Many of our poets are even more disdainful of
literary tradition than their prede<;:essors were a decade or more ago; they
sweep aside all past writing with a single epithet-bourgeois.
Even those who do not subscribe to this naive aesthetic, those who
fall into the first category of poets mentioned by Lewis, are almost as super–
ficial in their attitude toward literary heritage. They do not negate liter–
ary influence; but they do little more than tinker with it gingerly, nibble
at it casually. They echo a poet here and there, thinking they can produce
poetry by "however skilful a blending of the best ingredients," as Lewis
phrases it. I am afraid that none of them have been deeply earnest about
it, have sought out and rt'worked their poetic inheritance with one-half
the critical insight or persistence of their English cousins.
However, if the newer English poets have rooted themselves in a
poetic tradition, they have stopped at this point. The seed which they
have got out of traditional soil has been replanted in the same soil. So far
they have failed to strike out for really new
territory~as
the Romantic
pot'ts did, for example. What they have
not
done is put very well by
