BOOKS
211
as
a new hope for poetry; most of the poets-though not all-share
certain not unfamiliar attitudes. I feel no special call to award precise
merit badges and elect Eagle Scouts; under the circumstances it seems
more profitable .to inquire after the bases of this partial uniformity.
One half the business of contemporary poetry appears to be a bitter
post-mortem on contemporary existence, seen, of course, through the
selective microscope of self. The anatomy of the world in most of these
poems will bring no relief to refugees from the newspapers. Nor, with
such a program, has there been much place for a patriotic refurbishing of
democratic ideals, or for a literature "that expresses the states of mind by
which the race has risen" (to quote Oliver Allston). It is doubtful whe–
ther there has ever been a war that has got along 'with so little poetical
inspiration. There have been patriotic poems, to be sure, in the columns
where you would expect to find them; Tin Pan Alley has done its bit;
and I understand General Patton has taken to poetical exhortation. But
there has been no Rupert Brooke, and not even a Robert Service. As
usual, in the Army the hand-made dirty songs have been a lot more
popular than the machine-made patriotic ones. Perhaps the final irony
for both MacLeish and his Irresponsibles has been that the Army and
Navy have found no trouble at all in building their planes and launching
their battleships
without
recovering "a faith in the exptession of these
things-the final things for which democracy will fight-in words."
The apparent exception to these generalizations is of course the
late Stephen Vincent Benet's
Western Star.
The poem is a celebration
of the American pioneer spirit: certainly an appropriate theme to express
the states of mind by which the race has risen. Yet it should be noted that
its choice was no response to the war. The poem was begun in 1934;
and plainly it came out of no exhortations of the time, but out of Benet's
continuing interest in American history and American lore.
The qualities of the poem are due to Benet's long and honest attach–
ment to his subject. The poem has been extravagantly praised; but it
does not deserve sneers as a counter-measure. The extravagance of the
praise was inevitable, for two reasons: first; because it was the posthumous
book of an amiable man who died too young; and second, because it is
about the only serious poem published recently that even remotely ap–
proaches the recipe of the reformers of poetry in our time. The poem has
some virtues: it conveys a genuine emotion about the difficult deeds of
our ancestors, and it illuminates, not in a textbook fashion, some of the
odd corners of our early history. Its rhythms are pleasantly varied to re–
lieve the monotony of blank verse and to suit the mood. But that is about
the list of assets. All the difficulties of the novel in verse remain:
the frequent impression of slackness in the verse, the difficulties in tran–
sition from realism to lyric exaltation. Finally, the emotion of the book,
honest though it seems to be, is essentially nostalgia rather than hope:
it does not appear how Benet proposed to m<!-ke the jump to modern
