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POETRY CHRONICLE
A MAN AGAINST TIME.
By William Ellery Leonard. Appleton-Century.
$2.00.
TRIBUTE To THE ANGELS.
By H. D. Oxford.
$2.00.
AMERICAN CHILD.
By Paul Engle. Random House.
$2.00.
THE CLOTH OF FLESH.
By Sean Jennett. Faber
&
Faber.
6s.
FIVE RIVERS.
By Norman Nicholson. Dutton.
$2.00
SPRINGBOARD.
By Louis MacNeice. Random House.
$1.75.
SHORT Is THE TIME.
By C. Day Lewis. Oxford.
$2.25.
LITTLE FRIEND, LITTLE FRIEND.
By Randall Jarrell. Dial.
$2.00.
T
HESE NEW books are svelte, the jackets gay, the prices high, the pub–
lishers demure, and everything should be fine. We shall see. But
since nothing but confusion would be served by considering these writers
as a group-the War Poets (who isn't?), the Nco-Atomists:
Tema con
variazioni-,
I shall discuss them in no particular order, and leave the
generalization to you. Let us begin with the dead.
The late Mr. Leonard's
A Man Against Time
makes me want to
shorten the proverb to
De mortuis nil,
but I suppose one must say some–
thing. It is a sonnet sequence, and a damned embarrassing one. The
'I'
of the poem is a man of 57 married to a girl of 24 (though the 57
seems 97 and the 24, 16), which is a theme of respectable lineage, and
there is something even Chaucerian in the simplicity of 'Naked you make
my naked lap your bed, / White twenty-four in tawny fifty-seven'; but
unless I am being helplessly vulgar myself, there is something more than
unhealthy in the poet's obsession with nudity and senility. Certainly the
image of an onanistic Aphrodite (sonnet xxxvi) is in ghastly bad taste;
and though Lucretius, Vergil, Dante, Milton and Goethe are all con–
descendingly invoked in one sonnet (lx), I think that only Lucretius
would reply:
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,
when the
religio
is merely inguinal itching. For the rest, the sonnets, are an extended
cliche of rant and rhetoric. 'It is rare,' Mr. William Rose Benet com–
ments, 'that so unusual a manuscript is found unpublished after the
death of a distinguished writer.' I hope that Mr. Benet is right.
A kind of dithering slickness gleams from H.D.'s latest work, a
mystical effluvium called
Tribute to the Angels.
Using as symbols the
flowering of a blasted tree and the alchemical fashioning of a jewel,
she elaborates the familiar paradox of
I.
Cor. XV: 36,
That which thou
