BOOKS
463
"BETWEEN SHALL-I AND I-WILL"
FoR THE TIME BEING.
By W. H. Auden. Random House.
$2.00
V-LETTER AND OTHER POEMS.
By Karl Shapiro. Reyna[ and Hitchcock.
$2.00
MoDERATE FABLE.
By Marguerite Young. Reynal and Hitchcock.
$2.00
THE GoLDEN MIRROR.
By Marya Zaturenska. Macmillan.
$1.75
TAKE THEM, STRANGER.
By
Babette Deutsch. Henry Holt.
$2.00
T
HESE five books show how impossible it has become for us to respond
to "pure" feeling, and how poetry has gravitated toward complex
internal conditions.
'
Miss Zaturenska, for example, possesses a sensibility; but her "lucid
dream" is not caught and the language, playing over a certain wistful–
ness, recalls the Pre-Raphaelite surface of Rossetti or Swinburne, with–
out, however, the adroitness of Pre-Raphaelite design. One has simply
a sense of "poetic" inflation. Except for "Annunciation," a macabre
sonnet deeply experienced, the response of Miss Deutsch to a suffering
world is one of uncomplicated distress and uncomplicated optimism–
"The race goes on although the track is blind." Technically Miss Deutsch
remains devoted to imagist devices that are only occasionally hard and
dry enough--Tennyson
cum
imagism.
If
Miss Young is "external," she accomplishes quite different effects.
She still lingers on prismatic ground in the sense that the purely con–
ceptual tension of many of her poems is relatively too great; that is, she
writes a poetry of ideas rather than a thoughtful or meditative poetry.
Having moved from an earlier concern with the local to an interplan–
etary point of view that entails some sacrifice of humanity, she is much
concerned with themes of space, time, process, illusion and reality. These
could well lead, a they do in Auden, to contemplative verse; in her case
they frequently remain on the level of the conceptual rather than spec–
ulative, as in "The Responsibility of Parentage." The serious danger is
cleverness and a polymath obscurity. To be sure, this very reliance upon
the cerebral makes possible some of the most successful poems-"That
Chance," "A Crystal Principle," "A High Subjectivity." C. Day Lewis
expected that poetry would increasingly assimilate the science of the
century. Miss Young does not entirely fulfill this expectation; she cul–
tivates astonishment and seems to presume that a large subject makes a
large poem. She is at her best (which is very nimble) whenever the lan–
guage of the sense interpenetrates the language of concept, resulting in
genuinely metaphysical equivalence of mind and flesh:
...
and valid in being therefore
And beautiful, the escape from each simple of total
Is the heartbeat thief, mistake, flaw
Permitting his purple eye and whitened skull.
In spite of the pressure behind "Null Class" or "Farewell at the
