BOOKS
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ferred epithets and the violent incongruities of image. They seem now to
be more contrived and rhetorical, less imaginative; though maybe it is
only that their novelty is less striking at a later meeting.
Thomas is anyway a fish out of the orthodox water I have been
describing; Geoffrey Grigson and Roy Fuller, on the other hand, are
very definitely in it, and their differences are for that reason in one way
illuminating. Grigson is a non-combatant poet, Fuller a combatant one;
indeed he seems to me the best of those I have read, though I can't
pretend to any full knowledge. Grigson's poems have a good deal of quiet
charm. Most of their quality is in their sobriety, their even-tempered
under-statement. One result is that the general bleakness of outlook,
which he shares, does not blind his other perceptions; another is that
he refuses to exaggerate the intensity of the woe in the world, or his own
peculiar claim to it.
The combatant outlook-in Fuller, at any rate-is not basically
different from the usual intellectual's orthodoxy. There is no hint at all
of
dulce et decorum est prjo patria mori;
there are not even those simple
certainties-the values of companionship and compassion-which the'
angry poets in the last war swapped for the patriotic enthusiasms with
which they had begun. But the feelings, as compared with Grigson, are
all more nervous, more strained, more intense. What makes them so is
the immediate and tangible presence of death in every poem, not as a
subject for rumination or a convenient symbol of finality, but as a
haunting and inescapable fear.
2.
After the analysis of dismay the other part of the orthodox business
is the discovery of consolations. Most of the poets find some: for Mr.
Grigson there are bitter-sweet memories of his childhood; for Mrs.
Marshall there are oceans; and for Mr. Patchen there is always himself.
But for Mr. Edwin Muir, in his
The Narrow Place,
the consolations
considerably outweigh the dismay. Mr. Muir is essentially a Humanist
poet of an old school; intelligent, devout, a little bookish, confident in
man's essential goodness. For him the bleaknesses of the present are
_accidents: less real to his own experience than the consoJations of love,
the truths of orthodox Christianity, and the patient powers of good
finally to wear away evil. "Now in this iron reign-I sing the liberty ..."
Mr. Muir handles his Christianity as part of the given equipment
to which a man of his culture is entitled. Mr. Hendry, however, in
The Orchestral Mountain
is out to create original religious experience.
This he attempts by 1) a great sprinkle of the conventional geology of
revelation: crystal, marble, alabaster, jacinth, coral, and assorted jewels;
and 2) a constant air of extra-terrestrial description gained by combin–
ing concrete (but usually celestial) terms with abstractions at peculiar
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