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PARTISAN REVIEW
application, now that the Census Bureau and Professor Turner have so
long agreed that the frontier ended in 1890.
The other individual poets have little in common with Benet except
the fact that their general attitudes seem to have been little altered
by the war. I suppose the truth is that the war had been so long expected
that its coming has meant confirmation rather than surprise; for the
poets, the images of war's destruction have only intensified their portrait
of the chaos of society and the agony of the isolated individual.
So in Mrs. Marshall's sensitive but rather fragmentary poems, the
machinery of warfare appears chiefly as one more evidence of mankind's
guilty interference with the calm blueness of the sky and the clean vast–
ness of the ocean (her favorite images). Kenneth Fearing has made
even less concession to the war, except for a poem on the dust jacket
about war bonds, in the familiar style. Within the covers he is at it
again, multiplying cliches to make a style of sorts, devising ingenious
scenarios to convey his conviction about the world's second-hand empti–
ness. There was a line from "Agent No. 174 Resigns" in his last book
of poems that might have been autobiographical: "I am tired of follow–
ing invisible lives down intangible avenues to fathomless ends."
If
it was,
it hasn't induced him to change his profession.
War has not altered Kenneth Patchen's conviction that all that is
Patchen is art; in fact in
Cloth of the Tempest
he sets out to demon–
strate this truism in drawing and collage as well as in poetry. On· the
other hand, war has made him angrier than most. This
indignatio~,
I
think it should be said, quite frequently gives him a vitality more attrac–
tive than, say, Fearing's exhausted fatalism. There are a lot of good lines
and good feelings in Patchen; the rarity is a whole poem. It is only once
in a long while-I should say "May I Ask You a Question, Mr. Youngs–
town Sheet and Steel" is an example--that he can resist the tempation
to spoil a good beginning with irrelevant cuteness, smartness, juvenile
humor, or just plain self-congratulation. I suppose all this is part of his
theory of art.
The English poets, with considerably more experience of the war
than we, show no markedly changed attitudes either. Death and violence
have always been among the big guns of Dylan Thomas' poetry. His
mystical absorption in death-in-life and life-in-death
welcomes
any
additional uncertainties (compare, for example, the sonnet "Among
Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged One Hundred").
As to the poetry in this new pamphlet, I confess to a certain disappoint–
ment. I have in the past found Thomas' poems fascinating, and I find
these at least exciting. I suspect my disappointment may have something
to do with the progress toward logical lucidity which the dust jacket
advertises as a selling-point. The presence of a more conventional logical
framework seems to make more evident the devices which produce so
much of the explosiveness of his poetry: notably the misplaced and trans-
