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PARTISAN REVIEW
a sense; but the opposite is true
in
a more direct sense. She writes at the
climax of her poem,
"If
these great patient/dyings-all these
agonie~/
and woundbearings and bloodshed/ can teach us how to live, these
dyings were not wasted"; and she is certain that they were not wasted,
and ends the poem with "Beauty is eternal/and dust is for a time." (The
armies and the peoples died, and it meant that Beauty is eternal.) Since
Pharaoh's bits were pushed into the jaws of the kings, these dyings–
patient or impatient, but dyings-have happened, by the hundreds of
millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die
ourselves, but never how to live. Who is "taught to live" by cruelty, suf–
fering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death? The
moral equivalent of war! Peace, our peace, is the moral equivalent of
war.
If
Miss Moore had read a history of the European "colonization"
of our planet (instead of natural histories full of the quaint animals of
those colonies) she would be astonished at nothing in the last world war,
or in this one, or in the next. She should distrust uSi and, herself, but not
at the eleventh hour, not because of the war (something incommensur–
able, beside which aU of us are good) : she should have distrusted the
peace of which our war is only the extrapolation. It is the peace of which
we were guilty. l\1iss Moore's seeing what she sees, and only now, be–
trays an extraordinary but common lack of facts, or imagination, or
something.
But how honest and lovable-how genuinely careless about
herself and caring about the rest of the world-Miss Moore seems in
this poem, compared to most of our poets, who are blinder to the war
than they ever were to the peace, who call the war "this great slapstick,"
and who write (while everyone applauds) that
they
are not going to be
foolish enough to be "war poets." How could they be? The real war
poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
For this poem Miss Moore has given up her usual method, because
of the emotion and generality that have overwhelmed her. I wish that
she had-as the world has-taken her little animals, her bric-a-brac with
all their moral and aesthetic qualities, her individuals with their scru–
pulous virtues, and shown them smashed willy-nilly, tortured, prostituted,
driven crazy-and
no~
for a while but forever: that is, till the day. they
died. As it is she has handled not these real particulars but abstractions
she is unfamiliar with and finds it hard not to be heroic about; and her
poem is neither good nor bad, but a mistake we sympathize with thor–
oughly.
I don't want to finish my review of Miss Moore without saying what
a good poet she is, and how lucky we are to have her.
William Carlos Williams is almost too much of a fact to be crit–
icized. In the best of his poems the Nature of the edge of the American
city-tile weeds, clouds and children of vacant lots-and its reflection
in the minds of its inhabitants, exist for good. His ironic (but certainly
