BOOKS
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But he is always jarring in and out of fit; he has such an inveterate, in–
sensate passion for bad rhetorical effects and other people's rhetorical
effects that, after the hundredth mesmeric echo of MacNeice, it is hard
not to forsake him for that better and far more sympathetic poet. One
1eads
...
Come up! Up up! The thunder at one with your voices in order
chants, things
Are with you, rolling her rump, Earth in bacchantic rumbas
grave swzngs
...
and reflects, "with an awed contempt," that Tennyson had to write
"Locksley H all," Auden his parody of it, and MacNeice his "Eclogue at
Christmas," in order that this couplet and its wretched siblings might
exist.
Mr. Devlin has a rather poor and arbitrary ear, generally; he writes
in everything from free verse to incredibly long, mechanical, and lolloping
lines. In his poems there is too much conscientious and jagged "brilli–
ance," too much description for description's sake, too many adjectives;
the poems are always too
something;
calm or proportion or rightness is
almost constitutionally lacking. Still, he is witty, knowing, and forceful;
his worse poems, plainly, are his earlier ones; and few poets understand
better just how complicated the world is. He is so extraordinarily uneven
that it is not right to judge him by the ludicrously quotable junk which
infests his book; it is fairest to think of his possibilities, which-one sees
from the best fragments of his work-are good
if
he can ever forget about
himself and his audience and the way people write poetry, and remember
only his subject and its poem.
Paterson ($ook
I)
seems to me the best thing William Carlos Wil–
liams has ever written; I read it seven or eight times, and ended up lost
in delight. It seems a shame to write a little review of it, instead of go–
ing over it page by page, explaining and admiring. And one hates to
quote much, since the beauty, delicacy, and intelligence of the best parts
depend so much upon their organization in the whole; quoting from it
is like humming a theme and expecting the hearer to guess from that
its effect upon its third repetition in a movement. I have used this simile
deliberately, because-over and above the organization of argument or
exposition-the organization of
Paterson
is musical to an almost unprece–
dented degree: Mr. Williams introduces a theme that stands for an
idea, repeats it over and over in varied forms, develops it side by side
with two or three more themes that are being developed, recurs to it
time and time again throughout the poem, and echoes it for ironic or
grotesque effects in thoroughly incongruous contexts. Sometimes this is
done with the greatest complication and delicacy; he wants to introduce
a red-bird whose call will stand for the clear speech of nature,
in
the
