BOOKS
491
Wylie and Teasdale and Treece and John Hall Wheelock arid-but I'm
tired; after noticing what an extremely poor job of selection Mr. Williams
has done with Auden, Bridges, Hardy, Housman, Pound, MacNeice,
Graves, Moore, and others-after all this, the reader may feel like damn–
ing Mr. Williams and his works without one further thought. But he
shouldn't; Mr. Williams is, I think, the best of this crew of professional
anthologists, and his anthology has plenty of good things to go along
with the bad: great quantities of Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Dylan Thomas,
Auden, Tate, Frost, and other fine poets; some, though not enough,
Empson and Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop and William Carlos
Williams; and seldom-anthologized poems like "Missing Dates," "Roost–
ers," "Song for the Clatter-Bones," "Scyros," "Starlight like Intuition
Pierced the Twelve," "John Kinsella's Lament," and several others.
(Also, the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection
of Oscar Williams' poems than I have ever seen in any other anthology.
There are nine of his poems-and five of Hardy's. It takes a lot of
courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy's.)
Mr. Williams is clever enough to print many of those poems that
have become limitedly famous among intelligent readers and critics;
and in spite of the mass of bad poetry that weighs it down, his anthology
gives a forcible impression of all the good poetry that has been written
in the last fifty or sixty years. Mr. Williams has a real taste for good
poetry; that he has just as real a taste for bad, spoils his book. He has
a soft spot in his heart-a softer spot, I mean-for any young English or
F.ngli,h-educated or English-influenced poet who gushes, and as a result
his Treasury is haunted by a flock of maundering harpies who insist on
giving you a pound of their heart's blood with any random ounce of sense.
Anyone at all interested in poetry should buy
Poems 1938-45,
by
Robert Graves (just as he should buy William Carlos Williams'
Patter–
son
and Elizabeth Bishop's
North and South),
if only to get one poem,
"To Juan at
t..~e
Winter Solstice." It is one of the most beautiful poems
of our century, and will surely be delighting people hundreds of years
frcm now. It is far and away the best poem in the book; but the other
poems are a pleasure to read even when they are inconsequential–
their texture is so accomplished and personal, so terse, self-sufficient, and
dryly or grotesquely or individually necessary, that the reader has the
superstitious and wholly mistaken illusion that the mediocre ones are
mediocre only because Mr. Graves didn't bother to write anything so
vulgar and alienated-from-himseli as a successful poem. The technique
of the poems is unusually objective and "classical"-a great deal of
English and classical poetry is behind the way they are written-since
metres and forms are things Mr. Graves can accept and transform as
easily as he accepts and transforms the gods and ghosts and other his–
torical beings that live on in the enchanting Hades of his novels ;.. but ·
what the poems say is sometimes wonderfully and sometimes rather disas-
