Books
NINE POETS
R. P. Blackmur
Nine books of contemporary verse running to over thirteen hundred
pages leave one both aghast and agape.
It
is education by shock; the lesson,
even after reflection, confusing, and the value dubious. Not for one's life
would one repeat what one thought one had learned. Far better, mouth
open and teeth showing, a conspirator caught, to stop at the shock. Let us
see why.
Mr. Belitt says it is because you must try to integrate yourself, make
of your senses a single faculty and "loose the inward wound to bleed
afresh." But his labour at integration ends, in 1938, rather more like
vertigo :
Tranced as in surmise, lost between myth and mood,
Derelict, decoyed,
In some astonished dream of sailing.
...
Dereliction is an important element in Mr. Belitt's sensibility; it is a func–
tion of sleep and dreaming, of a bird and of human stragglers: at any rate
we have derelict claws of a singing bird and certain inexplicit stragglers
by the surge. One should not make too much a point of it, yet it strikes
sharp; that Mr. Belitt's poetry fails of integrity less because it deals with
the sentiment of chaos and the moral of the abyss than because, in so deal–
ing, he prefers the dreamy, the quite somnambulistic state to the waking
representation. This is to indulge in the dereliction-the reprehensible
abandonment-of poetic duty. He does not say-he does not represent–
what he is writing about; he only indicates, and forsakes, what it was that
led him to write.
Otherwise he does very well; his words work on each other and carry
each other along apace; it is a pleasure, as sleep-walking goes, and at the
right remove, to reach his version of vertigo. With the work of Laura
Riding we have no such contact, no matter at what remove. Her poems may,
The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams.
1906-1938.
New Directions. $3;
Mirrors of Venus. A Novel in Sonnets.
1914-1938,
by
John Wheelwright. Bruce Humphries. $2.50;
A Glad Day.
Poems by Kay Boyle.
New Directions. $2;
Dead R•ckoning.
By Kenneth Fearing. Random House.
$1.25 ·
Letter to a Comrad1.
By Joy Davidman. Yale University Press. $2 ;
The
Gard1~
of Disorder.
By Charles Henri Ford. New Directions. $2;
Th1 Fiv•-fold
M1sh.
By Ben Belitt. Knopf. $2;
S1quene1 on Viol1nce.
By Harry Roskolenko.
Signal Publiahera. $1.50;
Th1 Collected Po1ms of Laura Riding.
Random
House. $4.
108
