80
PARTISAN REVIEW
signs. But Mr. Lowell's poetry is the most decisive testimony we have
had, I think, of a new period, returning to the deliberate and the formal.
In other respects, it is true, the break is incomplete. Our best work is
still difficult, allusive, and more or less didactic in intention.
A few technical notes. Lowell uses very heavy rime, and thud-metre,
spondaic substitution being much commoner than any other; these
characteristics alone permit him to indulge frequently and not cripplingly
in the hard short run-over that generally marks bad poets. He stops as
a rule after the first, the seventh, or the ninth syllable. For instance,
each but one
of the nine lines quoted above from
Between the Porch
and the Altar
shows caesura after the seventh syllable (the first begins
"and the day"). Perhaps only a master could keep in so narrow an area
and make it interesting, but the mastery is as yet certainly very limited.
Poets half his size are much more resourceful by way of movement. His
ear is not infallible, and this may have something to do with refrain–
weakness; though repetition, a considerable element in his designs, he
handles admirably (see a fine passage on
p.
10). What we might call
simultaneous repetition-with-variation, or the serious pun, he abounds in,
and the examples sometimes sound better than they are. Thus search–
guns "nick the slate roofs on the Holsterwall
I
Where torn-up tilestones
crown the victor"; here
crown
is effective, if it is, against the implausi–
bility of one meaning (invest, reward) and the infrequency of the other
(fall on, finish off): one leg ought to be firmer. The same wish to
crowd meaning is responsible for a good many of the slurred references
of which Mr. Jarrell complained in the earlier poems, and these continue,
now and then confusingly. Direct echoes are rare; "Fear with its fingered
stop-watch" remembers Auden's "Fear gave his watch no look,"-a
later "Fear,
I
The yellow chirper, beaks its cage" is original and good.
Considering the complication of his tradition, the book is notably fresh
and consistent. Sonnets, for whatever reasons, tend to be inferior to
other forms. The chief danger for a writer so dense is obviously turgidity,
and in the sonnets it is least successfully avoided. Whether Lowell owes
anything to a poet similarly "packed," Dylan Thomas, it is not easy to
say, and so he cannot owe much; there is some common ground in
diction for movement (lurch, blunder, lumber, sidle, heave, etc.) and an
illimitable barrier in religious attitudes; like Thomas' early similarities
to Hart Crane, whom he had not read, I set down to temperament and
tradition such resemblance as there is. Finally, despite a good deal of
international reference, perhaps inevitable now in the work of a sophisti–
cated poet, and despite some objection I feel to the very obscure word
"American," used chiefly as it is by canters and radio announcers, never–
theless it seems worth while saying that Lowell's poetry is deeply a local
product.
