PARTISAN REVIEW
with the struggle to actualise his individual experience of good and evil,
the true and inadequate, the beautiful and flat. This is the business of a
poet, not of a philosopher; and it is a very ambitious sort of poet to be.
This ambition is the seed of the positive side of Mr. Eberhart's
talent; it is the drive, or habit, or trope of his iJI?agination, that keeps
him at the poet's business of making something which can be appreciated
primarily
apart from its accidental inspiration-that
is to say, some-
thing as near the actual or the objective as words can come. The whole
matter may be managed for our present purpose by recalling' T.
S.
Eliot's comment on Matthew Arnold's remark that "no one can deny
that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beautiful world." Mr.
Eliot thought a beautiful world an advantage to mankind in general.
"But," he went on, "the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a
beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both
beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory."
Now that is a good deal to be able to see; it involves an inviolate sen-
sibility, requires a visitation of the Muse, and demands a pretty con-
tinuous mastery of craft. Yet it is just some such profession that Mr.
Eberhart's poetry wants to make; just as it is some formula of
escape
from this profession that your poetry of negative talent hints at, and
your pure poetastry even promises to provide.
That Mr. Eberhart comes short is not surprising; and the reason,
facilely thought of, is obvious: he so far lacks a theme adequate to hiJ
ambition as he sees it, or perhaps it would be more accurate to put it
that he has never so felt a theme as to require his consistent utmost in
craft. At any rate, the facts are that his poems show unevenness in
execution, strain of sensibility amounting sometimes to falsified emotion,
inconsistency in the modes of language in single poems, relapse into the
banal when the banal is not wanted, and verbal or typographical ex-
periment out of control. Most of these faults are at their worst when the
poems present the problem of imitation in acute form; or put the other
way round the faults tend to minimise themselves when his sensibility is
not deracinated by using other men's modes conspicuously. It is the dif·
ference between gross imitation and genuine imitation. Michael Roberts,
in his introduction to this volume, finds the influence of Blake in "In a
Hard Intellectual Light," and we may perhaps distinguish a sort o(
Yeats-Hopkins influence in "Cynic Song"; these are imitation digested
and genuine, and it is flattery to point them out. Gross imitation is some-
thing else again.
One of the most interesting, and certainly one of the most ambitious
poems in the book is "Four Lakes' Days," in which the poet walks four
different landscapes in four different weathers. The sense of landscapt
is fresh and stirring and intense; in its best passages, which are often
inseparable from the worst, it revitalises and redirects the sensibility.
Here is the best.
In air-shiver against white wall
A flower, blue, incandescent
