534
PARTISAN REVIEW
a mutual admiration society, but even more vocal and more aggressive
against opposition. What an ·amount of back-slapping and acclaiming
goes on among them! Meanwhile
it
is mostly to the good, for young
writers are more helped than hindered by mutual admiration.
Lyra
anthologizes the work of what looks to be their important majority.
Abandoning the positions won by Auden's so-called classicist movement,
they are in retreat towards a purer and more personal poetry, are all for
neater verse, traditional simplicities, descriptions, emotions in the presence
of nature, intimate events and their own love affairs-hetero-sexual at
last. In divesting themselves of the. conventions of modernism in order
to attain a more naked honesty, some of them have not only become "new
romantics," but have often mistaken for no conventions at all any ante–
dating Eliot:
"Kiss me before all breaks. Let me touch your dress.
If
we must die, then let it be of love,
And set the whole world trembling as we kiss."
But whether their poetry is good or bad, and for all their easy sentiment,
their
~ow-nothingism
and their reversionary aesthetics, these young
poets are serious in a way their American contemporaries too frequently
are not. For them poetry is not quite so exclusively a trade or profession,
but also a means of completing and realizing themselves. They may in
some instances be even greater careerists than their American fellows,
hut they are concerned with their poetry as persons, not just as writers;
they try. to connect
it
with everything else about which they are con·
cerned; they are superior to literature in that at least they seem interested
in more than achieving it; they want from their own work satisfactions
beyond those of success. In their resolve to be sincere they are not afraid
to write naively and unfashionably. As a result their verse, regardless
of its quality, manages to have a great amount of existence (Spinoza
notwithstanding). It may be little, hut it is not tenuous poetry. Not
even Francis Scarfe's three howling lines above.
Unlike some English poets of the preceding generation, a good many
of those in
Lyra
are better than they appear to be. However, the best
of them are very uneven, to judge from evidence in other publications
besides this one. Perhaps they think that honesty requires the publication
of their worst as well as their finest poems. G. S. Fraser, poised and
quietly powerful, is the least uneven of the lot, and perhaps the best,
though he has not the occasional brilliance of some of the others: Nicholas
Moore, whose "Little Black Box" is one of the most original poems of
our age, doing better in twenty-nine lines what otherwise only a novel
can do, is quite bad when he is not good. Henry Treece alternates between
flashes of fire and splashes of water. Wrey Gardiner, Charles Davey and
especially Emanuel Litvinoff are promising. Right now I should say that
Anne Ridler is the most consistently successful and original of the poets
in the book, though she seems rather limited. Like not a few poetesses
since Emily Dickinson, she deliberately bends her verse towards prose
