BOOKS
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of savor, and the unity of which is given only negatively by the absence
of a personal sensibility--'-add all this to the poet's uncertain ear, and
it
becomes inevitable that his book of poems should as a whole be hard
reading in spite of its many single excellences. Is it that Jarrell assents
to his faculty for making even the most ·concrete, vivid words-of which
blood
is perhaps the least vivid example-take on an abstract flavor,
because this gives words greater potentialities of connection, like oxygen
atoms? Is it that blood donated for strangers should have only the most
general properties of blood, because then it can be transfused into .any·
body's veins regardless of blood-type? Maybe so, maybe Jarrell is on
the way to a great kind of abstract poetry. There are some very good
abstrac::t poems in his book. But personal wisdom-wisdom about oneself
and one's
rela~ion
to others-out of which more than anything else Jarrell
strives in his plight to realize his most ambitious poetry, needs for that
to be fortified by much more substantial hints as to the problems offered
by the poet's own specific personality. For the rest, Jarrell has understood
his own case in concept. "The Winter's Tale" is a poem about those "Who
made virtue and poetry and understanding/ The prohibited reserves of
the expert, of workers/ Specialized as the ant-soldier ..." and about "The
substitutes of the geometer for existence."
R. P. Blackmur has improved considerably as a poet, but his per–
sonality is almost as blank as Randall Jarrell's, and he is much more
a victim of good taste.
If
Jarrell is without savor, Blackmur is without
flavor. His poems. have no foreground existence, but transpire backstage
behind a gauze of literature and Yeats. But his style does have its
academic distinction in spite of the mechanical and monotonous regularity
with which he divides lines; and four of the nine poems in this thin book
are quite successful in their Yeatsian way (repeating also the Yeatsian
themes of youth and age): "The Second World," "Missa Vocis," "For
Comfort and For Size" and "The Dead Ride Fast." Yet I suspect Black–
mur's good poems of having the same relation to genuinely good poems
that waxen images have to living beings: they only look the same, the
animating principle is missing.
It
is very difficult for contemporaries to
point out just wherein it is missing, for Blackmur is too sophisticated
a literary man not to
be
able to conduct himself in faultless accordance
with the best taste and usage of the time. But now and then the orifice
through which the soul escapes the body can be detected:
"There is disorder, like heavy breathing in the next room,
Like people making way when no one comes."
All the appurtenances of good poetry are here, but they are only appurten–
ances: "heavy breathing in the next room" and "making way when no
one comes" obnubilate the disorder, are falsely portentous. Blackmur
is after the intensity of pure poetry, but he contrives it instead of
creating it out of a necessity in himself other than his ambition as a poet.
One generation of English poets now follows hard on the heels of
another, the members of this latest one likewise closing ranks to form
