Books
THE LAST OMNIBUS
POEMS, 1930-1940. By Horace Gregory. Harcourt, Brace.
$2.50.
SO
POEMS. By E. E. Cummings. Duell, Sloan, and Pearce.
$1.50.
CANTOS Lll-LXXI. By Ezra Pound. New Directions.
$2.50.
FIVE YOUNG AMERICAN POETS. AN ANTHOLOGY. New Directions.
$2.50
There ought to be a law against omnibus reviews and perhaps even
against reviewing as many as two books together unless it is obvious that
they ought to go together; and although I do .not know who should decide
that a connection exists, it ought not to be left to the penetration of the
reviewer. There is no doubt some connection between Grimm's law and
the latest patriotic homily by Mr. Henry Luce, but I do not know who
could take the responsibility for it. The field of references supplied by a
miscellany of last month's books is likely to have as much critical value
as the matrix of military analogy through which Uncle Toby ordered his
experience; and it has very little chance of being ha.lf so entertaining. In
a review that includes Horace Gregory, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, to
say nothing of the Five Young Poets, the be&t that anybody can hope to
do is to take each of them up in turn as a stick to beat the others over the
head with.
We could easily begin by beating Horace Gregory over the head with
a stick called Ezra Pound. (I confess that my heart isn't in it, but what
else can I do?
It
is one of our most recent conventions, practiced with
varying degrees of brutality, vanity, and skill, by the "younger men," e.g.,
Jarrell and Levin; and if there is anything better calculated to attract
attention than the bad manners of a young man, it is the bad manners of
an old man; by which rule I may expect to be fifteen times as brutal, vain,
and skillful, as the young, being fifteen years older.) We have our anal·
ogy of the stick, which will be our critical approach throughout, and it
will
fortunately keep us from having to say anything about the people we
beat with it.
Horace Gregory: one of the best poets of his generation in the United
States; has never got his due; publishes too much, the too much in this
book being most of the pieces written since
Chorus for Survival;
has a
fine ear-or rather, I suspect, had it, unless the collapse of "The Postman's
-Bell
Is Answered Everywhere," a recent poem, is only temporary. In this
poem the loose rhythms are accompanied by a kind of willed documenta–
tion, in which there is little clean observation or energy of metaphor.
There was a good deal of this sort of thing in the early poems: it came, I
suspect, from the self-imposed obligation to uphold a social point of view
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