78
PARTISAN REVIEW
detail, "At cock-crow Charon checks us in his log." Some of these poems
are "imitations" in the eighteenth-century sense, and despite their height–
ened tone should perhaps be judged by a special standard. More in–
dependent is the second Edwards piece,
After the Surprising Conversions,
which is written in that phoenix metre, heroic couplet, the best run-on
couplets I have seen in a long time:
In the latter part of May
He cut his throat. And though the coroner
Judged him delirious, soon a noisome stir
Palsied the village. At Jehovah's nod
Satan seemed more let loose amongst us: God
Abandoned us to Satan.
... /
We were undone.
The breath of God had carried out a planned
And sensible withdrawal from this land.
Set the simplicity and manliness of this poem beside the mysterious frenzy
of
The Drunken Fisherman
or the drenched magnificence of
The Quaker
Graveyard,
and you will observe a talent whose ceiling is invisible.
But I don't wish to make a noise about Lowell, reviewers in other
channels being equipped for this, and popularity in the modern American
culture having proved for other authors not yet physically dead a blessing
decidedly sinister. One certainly wants to see fine poems honored and
read; and "I say it deliberately and before God," Hopkins wrote to
Bridges, "that fame, the being known, though in itself one of the most
dangerous things to man, is nevertheless the true and appointed air,
element, and setting of genius and its works." The secular dangers are to
candor and development, perhaps to fellow-feeling, considering the kind
of honor a comics-culture can confer; self-consciousness is the general
reef. Luckily Lowell is so intense tough unreasonable that he will probably
be safe. I will only make an historical remark. The author of a very
interesting leading article recently in
The Times Literary Supplement,
taking
The Orators
as the key book of the thirties, mentions in his
conclusion the fact that writers of the period, young and old, "preferred •
to precision of design and execution an approximate; a general feeling
arose that careful finish was in some way base ... the brilliant im–
provisation became a standard instead of an adventure." This is so just,
as scarcely to need illustration; you can see it best, after Auden's early
books, in the beautiful work done by Delmore Schwartz at the decade's
end in America-to name one line of corroboration, Mr. Blackmur hung
his review of
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
on the word "improvised."
Of course Auden himself reacted at once (even in
Look Stranger
regular
forms predominate), as Eliot's 1920 volume, under the influence of
Gautier, reacted against
Prufrock;
and there have not been wanting other
