56
PARTISAN REVIEW
the centre; only necessity could have driven them together. Gross imita.
tion is its own punishment.
I do not charge Mr. Eberhart with insincerity; it would be nearer
home to charge him with insufficient insincerity-for
the best of poetry
is Jesuits' trade, once the end is in view. It may rather be put that Mr.
Eberhart wants to put more into his verse than he has got ready in
imaginative form, and that he also employs imaginative devices beyond
the scope of the material he actually does have. If he
himself
wrote the
passages complained of above, and others in other poems drawn from
Hopkins and Eliot, not only would the source of complaint disappear
but the poems would be far more objective. That he could do this is
demonstrated by what he has done; that he wants to do it is either
obvious, or I am wrong entirely about what I feel as his sense of ~
profession: which for the practitioner must be above all the obligation
of craft.
R. P.
BLAcKMuR
POEMS.
By Louis MacNeice. Random House. $2.50.
Louis MacNeice is an exact contemporary of Auden's, but at thirty
has. been far less prolific. He offers now a collection which retains only
four poems from his first volume,
Blind Fireworks,
1929, and adds to
his volume of 1935 about fifteen poems more. He showed his Irish sense
of humor in choosing the title for his early poems "because they are
artificial and yet random; because they go quickly through their antics
against an important background, and fall and go out quickly." The
short musical exercises that he has decided to keep from these pieces
possess what Eliot, in talking about Blake, recognized as the more likely
kind of promise; instead of crude efforts to encompass something gran-
diose they are "quite mature and successful attempts to do something
small." The dislance he travelled between the less distinct remainder of
that volume and the
Poems
of 1935 is considerable. In the two years
preceding his second book he developed a distinguishing style, a rhythm
unmistakably his own. He seems to have profited most from Hopkins
in learning how to give to the conventional line a more z:esilient conver-
sational tone. But his feeling that Hopkins was wrong to bind his sprung
rhythm to the arbitrary frame of an equal number of accented syllables
for every line has enabled MacNeice to gain a greater fluency, and a
very deft approximation to an actual speaking voice.
Although he was at Oxford at the same time as the group of young
English poets who have hitherto been more widely discussed, MacNeice's
course has been fairly independent of theirs. His is not "fighting" poetry.
His impulse has not been contentious and hortatory like Auden's; he has
not joined Spender in romantic proclamations of faith. He has recently
