BOOKS
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by suppressing the beat. As for the rest of the anthology, some is fair,
some is mediocre, and quite a lot is bad. Exception should be made for
Alex Comfort, who along with the other two of
Three New Poets
is also
represented in
Lyra.
Comfort has the self-confidence and the sense of
what he can and cannot do that usually belongs only to older poets. He
creates superb sound effects, and elegiac gravity, the prevailing tone of
so much poetry nowadays, receives new shading in his verse:
"Strange that in me the ·shadow
moving the substance speaks: strange that such air
pulls the blue sinew, whom the blood maintains
whom the heart's coming slight defection
shall spill, speaks now and holds
time like a permanent stone, its cold weight judging."
This is the materialist (the poet is a medical student) approaching from
1
new direction. No virtuoso of punch lines, Comfort, like Moore, Lit·
vinoff and lately Spender, depends for effect on the total unfurling of the
poem. He has a good chance of becoming a large and serious writer.
Roy McFadden's poetry is slight, and has little beyond its honesty and
grace. Honesty is always rewarded in some measure, and McFadden
does get off a good passage now and then. Ian Serraillier is also
honest, and has a certain originality of language and versification,
but he seems even slighter than McFadden because he restricts his subject–
matter more. He has a timidity about going beyond the sense-world;
within it he describes well:
"And the clouds that pace
restles~
over Llewelyn,
for ever racing but for ever still
like runners painted on a vase, shall hold
their strange stationary course until,
time and the mountains melting, they from the sun
drop to the level world and freely run."
To have shown that it is still possible to• write convincingly such nice
derivative verse is a kind of triumph, and these young Englishmen are
certainly increasing poetry, yet the tendency they embody is regrettable
in so. much as it surrenders too many positions and goes back too far
in the sole endeavor to be honest. These poets are not ambitious enough.
They avoid the most difficult, which is usually the most important.
If
they insist on poetry's being pure again, can they not proceed beyond
Auden, instead of short of him, and try, as perhaps Barker is doing,
to cdnquer for pure poetry the areas which the previous generation
opened up in its flight from it? Their disillusionment with socialist
revivalism and everything else public is not excuse enough for the kind
of obscurantism into which these poets fall. Most of their American
contemporaries are at least willing to know more then they do. Herbert
Read's preface to
Lyra
forms a reply possibly to these objections. He
terms these new poets "pacifists in the
poetic
sense;'' and asserts that the
reconstruction they are undertaking requires their poetry to be "project'ea
