Books
LOWELL, THOMAS,
&C.*
I
N SOME VERY
serious sense there is no competition either on Parnassus
or on the hard way up there. Darley, that is, with
Nepenthe
and a
lyric or so, is as good as Keats. Mr. Ransom was probably wrong both
in
theory and practice when he concluded an unfriendly study of
The
Waste Land,
many years ago, with the remark that there was not room
in the pantheon for both Wordsworth and Mr. Eliot and he thought the
prior occupant of the seat would dispute it stoutly; a position, no doubt
abandoned since, which I recall to illustrate what can never receive
illustration enough, namely the difficulty and uncertainty of contempo–
rary judgment. But there is another sense in which it is sometimes worth
saying that work like Keats's demonstrates that work like Darley's
doesn't even exist. You can find in Keats everything you can find in
Darley, and you find it with transfigured power, and you find many other
things as well. Whatever the devotion of a lesser poet, it may be put
as the difference between the
occasional
and the
th ematic,
between the
making of a few fine poems and the conversion of a whole body of
material.
If
the first is impressive, the second is oppressive as well, troub–
ling, overwhelming. Now Robert Lowell seems to me not only the most
powerful poet who has appeared in England or America for some years,
master of a freedom in the Catholic subject without peer since Hopkins,
but also, in the terms of this distinction, a thematic poet. His work dis–
plays, in high degrees, passion, vista, burden. He looks
Beyond Charles Riuer to the Acheron
Where the wide waters and their uoyager are one
*
LoRD WEARY's CASTLE.
By Robert Lowell. Harcourt, Brace.
$2.50.
THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF DYLAN THOMAS.
New Directions.
$3.50.
YouNG CHERRY TREES SECURED AGAINST HARES.
By Andre Breton. View
Editions.
$3.75.
SECRET CouNTRY.
By Jorge Carrera Andrade. Macmillan.
$2.50.
THE FLOWERING OF THE Roo.
By H. D. Oxford.
$2.00.
THE EARTH-BOUND.
By Janet Lewis. Wells College Press.
$4.50.
SELECTED PoEMS.
By Kenneth Patchen. New Directions.
$1.50.
TRANSFIGURED NIGHT.
By Byron Va;:akas. Macmillan.
$2 .00.
