BOOKS
215
a more sophisticated work than
The Angry Summer.
The play deals with
the trial after his death of a Roman conqueror by the common people'
of Rome; and it achieves a moving indictment of imperial conquest.
As a radio play it seems easily the most successful I have read: the
diction is a stylized simplicity that manages to avoid rhetoric and
bombast (with vulgarity the besetting sins of radio diction); the judg–
ments are made with enough shading to avoid dogmatism; and the use
of the .supernatural seems to justify the fact that the characters speak
as typical voices, not as people. But I suspect my main reason for liking
it is much the same as with
The Angry Summer
1 :
the fact that it has
a simple and impersonal thing to say. I am not, of course, making a plea
fo~
simple propaganda poetry. I am simply recording a feeling that the
orthodox manner has become, taken in large doses, simply dull. The
difficulty is that one recognizes the attitudes in oneself, and is already
a little bored with them.
The alternative is certainly not versified editorials. The effort at
honesty with their own feelings which even bad contemporary poets show
is not a negligible quality. The standard for technique too seems now
admirable: , reasonably tight in form; direct and colloquial in diction
(the passion for fancy scientific and learned terms seems to be fading);
not willfully obscure; for the most part cured of the personal manner–
isms painfully learned first from Eliot and then from Auden. What is
needed in addition is something to say with conviction. Where the con–
viction is to come from I can't pretend to know.
ANDREWS WANNING
