112
PARTISAN
REVIEW
In another poem we find "the spirit dismembered with elan," where the
important word is elan. No stretch either of word or context in either
poem
will bring these words into definable vital (or organic) relation with the
meanings wanted. They are so used as to
be
deprived of their ordinary cumuli
of meaning without acquiring the authority of a new or special meaning.
When you find this type of writing expanded so as to be the only circulating
element in long and obviously serious poems, you will conclude that the
writer was not only not in possession of his subject but that he gave in only
to its most obvious temptations: of verbal vanity-the fluxion of words
without knowledge or assumption of the dictionary.
Poetry is to be regarded as the use of one vocabulary of the language.
I have heard a medical mao high in his profession assert that all medicine
lay in an up-to-date medical dictionary; by which he meant that if he
knew
his vocabulary he could objectify his knowledge. It is the same thing with
poetry, and with as much responsibility for life and death.
Of Miss Davidman's
Letter to a Comrade
there is less to say than of
any of the books on our list. She is more evenly a poet than any but the two
we have not yet mentioned; she has respect for the language, for the tradi–
tions of poetry, and for her own intelligence; she is forthright and what is
more important she is candid. For the most part she writes with authority
because she mostly limits herself either to what she knows or knows that
she wants to know. She resorts neither to dogmas nor to any of the devices
for stilling the consciousness, and succumbs only to those blueprint symbols
and spirit natural to a growing mind affected by the megalopolitan culture of
this decade. The spirit which conceives and the intellect which articulates
the predominant element of protest in her poems are not entirely hers, not
digested, not matured, but are a non-incorporated framework borrowed per–
haps from the land of the
New Masses
where the best of these poems pre–
viously appeared. She has, that is, permitted her sensibility to be violated by
the ideas which have attracted her. This is because the technique of her verse
is not yet strong enough or plastic enough to cope alone with the material
her sensibility has absorbed, and takes meanwhile any help it can get. There
is nothing surprising in this; the very forms of our education, and the very
formlessness of our taste, seem fairly designed to set us in immaturity by
preventing us, so to speak, from the maturity we had only to assent to to
inherit. Miss Davidman gives as her greatest promise that she has within her
the ability to make that assent.
With Mr. Wheelwright's
Mirrors of Venus
and Dr. Williams'
Collected
Poems
we come upon one man who insists upon his inheritance and attempts
to make the most of it, and another man who, looking at the botch of the
half-inherited, denies that there is anything to inherit. The difference is clear.
In Mr. Wheelwright you get the sense of perceptions powerfully backed,
fed, and formed; shaped
otherwhe~e! celebrat~d
here; a pattern not. re–
peated but rediscovered.
~n.
?r. Wtllia_ms at hts
be~t.
you get
p~rceptl?ns
powerful beyond the posstblhty of backing; the quotidian burgeomng wtth–
out trace of yesterday; the commonplace made
u~ique
because violently
~elt.
Dr.
Williams of course inherits more than
~e
thmks
a~d
Mr. Wheelwnght
not unnaturally suffers from what he inhents. The
M!r~ors ~~
Venus
lack
richness, the
Collected Poems
Jack culmination. Dr. Wtlhams
IS
full of tags
