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Am I not/the happy genius of my household?
suggests the
charm, honesty and rather astonishing limitations of his work. These
limitations are neither technical nor moral but intellectual. (Even his
good critical remarks sound as if they had been made by Henry Ford;
his critical sense seems kinaesthetic, only intermittently conscious, so that
he is unable, generally, to exploit his regular style for dramatic mo–
nologue, as he most effectively might.) His poems are, in a way, the
diaries of another Sally Beauchamp; but the tough responsible doctor–
half that says and does, the violent and delicate free-Freudian half that
feels and senses, have their precarious connection in one of the great
mythological attitudes of our country: Brooklyn, the truck-driver look–
ing shyly at the flower.
In the suburbs, theM one feels free:
his optimism
comes not from closing his eyes to the serpents but from strangling them.
He is young forever; so this optimism of ability and courage--touchingly
wrong in the old Hercules, dying in' his shirt of fire-is still precariously
right for the young one. He is the America of poets.
The bombers came over H. D. as she was making ( 1) an apology
for poetry in wartime (2) a theory of the primacy-of theory over prac–
tice (3) a believing study of Egyptian religious machinery. The poem
that combines the four is felt, queer, sincere, more than a little silly: the
smashed unenclosing walls jut raggedly from the level debris of her
thought (which accepts all that comes from heaven as unquestioningly
as the houses of London). H. D. is History, and misunderstands a later
stage of herself so spectacularly that her poem exists primarily as an
anachronism: Churchill in his shelter-suit reading
The Battle of Britain,
the new poem of a Mr. Addison.
Miss Garrigue is much the best of New Directions' Five Young
American Poets. Her poems often have the guaranteeing and personal
queerness ofl a diary; her most successful (urgent dream-landscapes) are
not the most promising. The poems seem to say: I don't exactly
believe
in modernism, but what else is there? Except myself? The
myself
is what
we value. But she should ask herself: How much is sensibility worth?
Miss Merriam's poems are fluent, effective, full of emotion and
reality-if one could suspend even the capacity for disbelief, and pretend
that they are poems at all. Their aesthetic distance is negative; they are
really pre-poetry, verse for Pavlov's dogs.
Lax, undone, like tr,embling
legs of bride/spread wide and sweet/for him to enter in:
these are real
toads in real gardens ... Mr. Nims gets his methods from Shapiro, Au–
den and the rest, his matter from newsreels, and his principles of under–
standing from Maritain's textbook of philosophy (this is not a very nasty
remark for people who 'have not read the textbook); his poetry has the
efficiency and charm of one of Joyce's Jesuits. He and Miss Merriam are
sisters under the skin, and both, of them are flayed.
Tennessee Williams must be one of those hoaxes people make up to
embarrass
Poetry
or
Angry Penguins:
no real person-no fictional one
