74
PARTISAN REVIEW
and when he addresses his Maker there is no device, the verse wheels
and enlarges, the man really sounds like a prophet,
Lord, from the lust and dust thy will destroys
Raise an unblemished Adam, who will see
The limbs of the tormented chestnut tree
Tingle, and hear the March-winds lift and cry:
"The Lord of Hosts will overshadow us."
Without first-rate qualities ambition is nothing, a personal disease; but
given these qualities, the difference is partly one of ambition. Hardy for
instance had little (he says that all he wanted was to place one or two
lyrics in some good anthology), and notwithstanding a long and rev–
erent love for Hardy I think Mr. Eliot was right when he observed
on the occasion of Yeats's seventieth birthday that Hardy now appeared,
what he always was, a minor poet. There is much human development
over the sixty years between
Hap
and
He resolves to say no more,
but
little poetic development, nothing comparable to what Mr. Lowell has
achieved in the two years between his first book and
Lord Weary's Castle.
I should say from the poems that this author's ambition is limitless. Whe–
ther he has yet written poems as good as Hardy's best this is no moment
for judging, though I think the question will one day come up. What is
clear just now is that we have before us a genuine, formidable, various,
and active poet; as to which character I put in evidence
The Drunken
Fisherman, The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, The Exile's Return,
At the Indian Killer's Grave, After the Surprising Conversions,
and
parts of a dozen other poems.
Readers of the new book will find it very different from
Land of
Unlikeness,
though it brings over ten poems from that book, heavily
rewritten as a rule. The earlier poems writhed crunched spat against
Satan, War, modern Boston, the Redcoats, Babel, Leviathan, Babylon,
Sodom. The style was bold, coarse, surexcited, so close in some respects
to its models-the Jacobean lyrists, early Milton (as Mr. Jarrell pointed
out in a perceptive review), Allen Tate as a Roman and polemic writer,
Yeats as a dynastic-that it was surprising that one had nevertheless
a stormed impression of originality. Lowell avoided by instinct the chief
religious influences that might have crushed him, Hopkins and Eliot, as
well as the influence (Auden) that has strait-jacketed much talent
among men just older than himself; but he began like Eliot and Auden
with satire-as most ambitious writers in a society like ours apparently
must do. Despite some continuing violence of style, however, and the
persistence of sardonic detail, the general effect of
Lord Weary's Castle
is not satirical. It is dramatic, moral, elegiac; and the escape from satire
represents a triumph for a talent not essentially satirical. Not only is there
