242
PARTISAN REVIEW
which I have never been able to feel was congenial to Gregory. I mean
congenial
to
him as a poet. For there are two things that he does supremely
well and I do not know whether anybody has discussed them: elegy and
nostalgia, and the two are constantly interwoven of the materials of his
boyhood and ancestry. The shocked awareness that "industrial America"
compromises the innocence of these emotions becomes articulated in some–
thing that may be roughly described as Marxism; hence the flat passages
of social documentation which have an air of deliberate self-torture. It is
as if the poet were saying, "I hate this, and if it could be corrected (by
Marxism ) I might recover the innocence of my childhood." This is per–
fectly serious, and is one of the historic situations of poets; for however
complex a poet's nerves may be, his "ideology" tends to gross simplifica–
tion. Our tradition of more than a century of blaming society for lost
innocence makes us oscillate between nostalgia on the one hand and indict–
ment on the other; but when Gregory gets out of this trap he writes some
of the best poetry of the time. I would cite a great deal of
No Retreat
and
most of
Chorus for Survival,
particularly number 15 of the latter. It is
now time for somebody to undertake a close enquiry into this poet, to see
what he adds up to.
What I have to say about Pound ii going to be perfunctory: the new
Cantos leave me very, very cold; and short of a roundabout survey of all
the Cantos, the less said the better. Respect for Mr. Pound, were there
enough space, could easily lead to the collection of small garlands, even
from the new book; there are many beautiful passages lying limp on the
sand. Some reviewers have remarked that Pound has no prosody in the
new Cantos. I think this is a mistake: he has exactly the same prosody
that he had in Canto
I.
The difference is in the subject-matter. In the
first thirty we were able to attribute structure to the verse because we felt
a certain historical unity in the material: there is for us something like a
direct line from Homeric Greece through the Italian Renaissance to mod:
ern Europe; but between John Adams and the agrarian emperors of China
there is only a community of economic abstraction, which Major Douglas
alone understands today, and of high courtesy, which Mr. Pound evidently
despairs of reviving.
If
Cummings was as good as most people said he was fifteen years
ago, he couldn't be as bad now as the neglect of
50 Poems
by the review–
ers makes him out to be.
If
Cummings is now taking the penalty of a chi–
chi reputation in the twenties, there is every reason to believe that the
people who built him up in that special way ought to suffer it with him;
but of course they will not. Nobody in those days was stronger for Cum–
mings than Edmund Wilson, who was tireless in pointing out to us every
novelty that Cummings produced. Have Cummings' defenders departed
because he no longer produces novelties? Scattered poems in all his
books, the greater portion of
and,
and three or four poems in the new
book are among the best work of our time. Of these last, poem 34 ("my
father moved through dooms of love") is the most moving and brilliant,
