124
PARTISAN REVIEW
except Humpty Dumpty-would say about poets, "For others, I know,
the Army has offered a haven." (That haven, Dachau.)
If
Tennessee
Williams wrote more like W. C. Williams I should think him another of
Laughlin's pseudonyms; this would
rend~r
a little more plausible the
carefully fantastic localization of the poems: Darien, Gloucester, Santa
Monica, Jacksonville, Washington, New Mexico, Vero Beach, Memphis,
New Orleans, Boston, Manhattan, Acapulco, St. Louis, St. Augustine
and Summer. The romany chal! Mr. Williams writes two prefaces, a
Serious Version and a Frivolous Version; I have printed only a Frivolous
Version of my criticism, but I assure his friends that they would not
willingly exchange it for the other.
When it comes to poems in Spanish I
am
in the position of the
orangoutang. furnc;:ss taught to say
Papa
and
cup;
Alejandro Carrion's
real productions can evoke from me only
Ah,
si
or
jQue linda es Michoa–
canj-the
two phrases Mexico taught me to love or to pronounce. The
translations are collocations of images and sentiments unexceptionable
eBough to remind one of the identity of indiscernibles, or of the Egyp–
tian letters Gardiner mentions, where the reader understands every word
and every sentence, but neither why they were written nor what they
were intended to convey. One can be too neighborly.
Some of Mr. Lowell's poems are so good
(The Drunken Fisherman
is the best poem in any of these books) and all are so unusual that it
makes reviewing his book a pleasure. A "traditional" poet is one who
uses the usual properties and images to say the usual things; Mr. Lowell,
a really traditional poet, is sometimes able to exploit the resources of
language and the world, for the organization of a poem almost exactly
as some of the poets of the seventeenth century were able to. His lan–
guage is nouns and verbs and the necessary connectives-a few adjec–
tives, next to no adverbs; its exceptional strength is not merely the
strength of intensity, emotional and rhetorical, but the basic intrinsic
strength of language itself. Often he knows (as almost no contemporary
poets know except in theory) that language at its strongest is
not
lan–
guage that remains at the highest emotional and textural intensity as
long as one can force it to; that sensibility is like money-good only for
what it can buy; that the whole is what the parts are for. He has never
been fooled into the vulgar belief in the separation (opposition, even)
of the "connotative" and "denotative" functions of language-a belief
that reaches its most primitive level of absurdity in Winters' positively
pre-Socratic view. Mr. Lowell's essential source is early Milton; obvious
but unimportant sources for a few details are Hopkins
(You are their
belle/And belly too ... Celestial Hoyden)
and Tate.
What
Mr. Lowell
says could not have been said, guessed at, or tolerated before. His world
is our world-political, economic and murderous-cruelly insisted upon,
with all our green and pale hopes gone, their places taken by a blind
