48
PARTISAN REVIEW
Letters Today, New Verse
is the most strictly edited and probably the most
vigorous little periodical in England. It continues to be the organ of
Auden and Co., though it is not unresponsive to new talents. Anti-war
and anti-fascist,
New Verse
is also anti-Bloomsbury. It takes off from a
lively if not very profound insurgency, which is half-bohemian, half·
social in content; but which, despite its mongrel character, puts the
magazine far to the left of the more official left-wing organs. And the fact
that
New v' erse
can kid Auden for accepting the King's Medal, blast
Day Lewis for taking a post on the Book Society, raise questions about
the alleged arrest in the U.S.S.R. of Boris Pasternak, and still continue
to flourish, suggests that the political atmosphere of the islands is friend·
lier to editorial independence than is that of America. The latest (March)
issue of
New Verse
contains a long "Ode" by Frederic Prokosch,
poems
by Spender, Kenneth Allott, Ruthven Todd and others. The "Remarks"
department-written, one gathers, by Geoffrey Grigson- includes a
tirade against
Biedermeierkultttr,
or the cult of bibelots, as it reveals itself
in the art reviews of
The New Statesman.
There is also an answer to
Tom Harrisson (one of the founders and "controllers'? of Mass-Obser·
vation), who recently, in an issue of
Light and Dark,
assailed Auden for
seeming to prefer "Art and Death to Life."
The unity and the ' polemical fire which Mr. Grigson's one-man
editorship lends to
New Verse,
are lacking to
Twentieth Century Verse.
This small but readable periodical, which recently published the valuable
Wyndham Lewis Number, is a poetic miscellany; the influence of the
younger writers (Dylan Thomas, etc.) seems to predominate; and the
editorial trend is away from ideology and causes. The March issue con·
tains poems by D. S. Savage, R.
B.
Fuller, Julian Symons (the editor),
Geoffrey Parsons and others. And the review section subjects William
Carlos Williams to a curiously bigotted attack as a "fake Imagist-Objec.
tivist."
Two other magazines come within the creative category.
Wales
is a regional affair, with vaguely proletarian sympathies but little pos–
itive social character. Such militancy as it has, is directed against the
"pansy competition," the "log-rolling, cocktail parties, book clubs, knight.
hoods, O.M.'s, and superannuated effeminacy" of London circles. Since
its first appearance last summer,
Wales
has printed some excellent verse
and fiction, beginning with a good piece of fantastic prose by Dylan
Thomas in the first number. I have not seen a recent issue. The newly
organized
T oU'1Lsman,
on the other hand, is avowedly anti-political
and esthetic, calling for the restoration of Bohemia. Opening at the top
on a spiral hinge, its format suggests a school notebook; while its editorial
style seems to be derived from the famous epistolary code of Ez.r:a Pound.
The contents include a fragment of Pound's opera,
Villon,
and some
nondescript prose and verse; suggesting that there is little freshness and
less unity in the purer precincts of Bohemia.
F. W.
DUPEE
