492
PARTISAN REVIEW
trously the expression of his own peculiar being. He says that he writes
poetry only for poets-but sometimes he writes it for one poet, and it
is only as we approximate to that poet that we get the full value of
the poems. But his new poems are not, generally, as whimsical or special–
case as most of his old ones: he hasn't withered into truth, but has been
gnarled and warped and furrowed into an extraordinarily individual
rightness which
is
sometimes "true" as well. Most of what successful
poems there are in this book are small-scale, one-sided, too close to the
(often beautifully witty or odd) Satires and Grotesques which follow
them; nevertheless, Mr. Graves is one of the few poets alive who can
write a first-rate poem, and one of the very few who are getting much
better as they get older.
If
I were Clement Attlee I'd pension or imprison
Mr. Graves to get him to write more poems: certainly either action
would seem matter-of-course to Robert Graves.
Denis Devlin is plainly a writer of intelligence and information, and
he has a gift for language-for MacNeice's language, especially; but it
doesn't seem to me that he has yet managed to make a good poem out
of what he has. He hasn't enough heart or concentration, or enough
realization of the demands the poem makes upon the poet-the demands
that exclude not only bad and mediocre, but a great many good details
from the completed work. He concentrates from instant to instant upon
the parts, usually very rhetorical parts, and lets the whole take care of
itself; he has a distracting method-persisted in for its own sake, regard–
less of the needs of the subject- of continually thinking about other peo–
ple's poems or remarks, his own historical or geographical or cultural in–
formation, and making so many overt or .covert allusions to all this that
the reader realizes that he is being taken on an expensive, cultivated,
expected digression, a Grand Tour. There is something rhetorical, uneven–
ly assertive, collage-y, sophisticated about the poems; the poet is extra–
ordinarily conscious of surfaces-as a child he must have mirror-fought
as other children pillow-fight. It is unjust to tell readers that Mr. Devlin
is a diplomat, since they have a fair chance of guessing that from the
poems.
. . .
Bolder than the peasant tiger whose autumn beauty
Sags in the expletive kill, or the sacrifice
Of dearth puffed positive in the stance of duty .
..
Surely the English Triumvirate could have sued Mr. Devlin for all this–
flattery.
Stance!
Why, this is Norpois' attitude to a cliche: one imagines
Mr. Devlin shaking hands with the first Roosevelt and murmuring,
"Bully!" At his best Mr. Devlin is very different:
Magnificence, this terse-lit, star-quartz universe,
Woe, waste, and magnificence, my soul!
