Books
POETRY IN WAR AND PEACE *
P
OETS ARE in the beginning hypotheses,
in
the middle facts, and in
the end values. One looks from the new window and m·urmurs, like
the lady who read
Alice:
"What a lie!" But in a quarter of a century
even the chairs see through that window not a landscape but the Beauti–
ful. So Miss Moore is reviewed not as a poet but as an institution–
though not yet, like Auden, as an eleemosynary institution; one reviewer
calls Miss Moore the greatest living poet and
Nevertheless
her best book,
ending with the demand that she be placed in Fort Knox for the dura–
tion. Certainly she writes better poetry than any other woman alive;
but I have used up my small share of the superlative in previous reviews
of her- this time let me look through Miss Moore and see neither lies
nor Beauty, but some trees. (Whoever you are, I like her as much as
you; so don't complain.)
Miss Moore's method is analytic, an illogical atomism : the static
particulars with which she operates are at the farthest level of abstrac–
tion from the automatically dynamic generalizations of the child or ani–
mal. The usual English accentual-syllabic metre produces in the reader
the feel of the emotion or generalization
passing through
the particulars,
a wave as real as the elements that compose it; Miss Moore's syllabics
merely fix her specimens on their slides. She has said that the deepest
feeling manifests itself in restraint, and certainly in her lines the crude
natural rhythm of the primitive emotion has been restrained away to
nothing. So her rhymes, rejecting the firm kinaesthetic confidence of the
common English rhyme, force us to slow or stumble in our efforts to feel
or even to find them. Everything combines to make the poem's structure
visual and instantaneous rather than auditory and temporal, a state
rather than a process. With some poets we are confused about where we
began and where we ended, but are sure that we have been moved; with
Miss Moore we know just where we are, but we stay there. Poetry has
its own principle of Indeterminacy: if the position of something is fixed
with the highest degree of accuracy, its movement cannot be. (Thus in
Virginia Woolf, as in Hume, there is no "action": the sense data are a
pack of cards which organize themselves into a game of poker-so we
*NEVERTHELESS.
By
Marianne Moore. Macmillan.
$1.25.
THE WEDGE.
By
W . C. Williams . Tlie Cummington Press.
$3.50.
THE WALLS Do
NoT FALL.
By
H . D. Oxford.
$2.00.
FIVE YouNG AMERICAN PoETS:
1944.
New Directions.
$3.00.
LAND
OF
UNLIKENESS.
By
Robert
Lowell. The Cummington Press.
$3.00.
