536
PARTISAN REVIEW
away from the immediate struggle into the new world which has to be
created out of the ruins of our civilization." And he also says, "By the
end of the Spanish Civil War, the poetry of action had fought in the last
ditch." Well, in the face of those two threatening phrases, "poetry of
action" and "war poetry," I still insist on countering with
little poetry.
Having made my objections, let me say that I share the premonitions
of a poetic renaissance which Herbert Read gets from the work of these
new English poets. Much talent is abroad among them, talent enough
to defy all remonstrances.
On
the strength of this second collection of his poems to be published
in this country Stephen Spender is already a great poet. At least ten to
twelve of his lyrics will not be forgotten, among them in this book
"Exiles From Their Land, History Their Domicile," "The Past Values,"
"Darkness and Light," "The Human Situation," "The Double Shame,"
"A Wild Race," "Winter and Summer," "In a Garden," "The Ambitious
Son"-and there are some others as great or almost as great.
Since his first book Spender has become less measured and poised,
although he has taken more to rhyme, assonance and set forms. He is
much closer to the
Lyra
poets than either he or they seem to recognize.
In his "Foreword" he says: "The violence of the times we are living in,
the necessity of sweeping and general and immediate action, tend to
dwarf the experience of the individual, and to make his immediate en·
vironment and occupations perhaps something that he is even ashamed
of. For this reason, in my most recent poems, I have deliberately turned
back to a kind of writing which is more personal, and I have included
within my subjects weakness and fantasy and illusion.". (I tend to doubt
the deliberateness of this turning.) Spender's work is uneven for the
same reason that operates in the case of Moore, Comfort and the others:
the determination to write as one must rather than as one would, and to
publish all. With respect to Spender it could be wished though, that there
was a little less sincerity and a little more honesty. So much of his
latest
p~try
being a personal confession, Spender's excess of sincerity
is to state not only the weaknesses on which he has acted, but also the
strengths-or rather powers of feeling-on which he did not act. (But
you are what you do and not altogether what you feel and know.) It
makes a lot of his poetry
pleurnicherie,
exhibitionist self-pity, inflated
pathos; especially when he interrupts himself to cry "I too am moved
by this!"-as if he would be writing a poem if he wasn't. Many otherwise
·successful poems are spoiled by over-intimacy, .usually towards their
close. Also, Spender is seduced by his own eloquence, by his grace and
ease of language, into repetition, wordiness and obscurity. His knack–
and gift-like Rilke's, of protracting images sometimes runs away with
him, and leads him, like Shelley, from the definite to the vague instead
of the other way about, too often ending up among flowers, suns and
SUlJ!mers, or else snow and ice.
