90
PARTISAN REVIEW
that would sound a verbal music to the melodic ear. Its diction might
well be clipped and dry, but in any case would be controlled and firm;
its tendency would be ironic understatement. Withal the poem should
have wit and elegance and charm-lyric grace is perhaps the best sum–
mary. As to subject matter, large schemes are dangerous; the Philosophi–
cal and Social Muses are sirens. On the whole the theme had best
be
elegiac; though neither serious comedy nor devotional piety need
be
excluded by the elegiac strain.
Not unnaturally the authors are most sympathetic to the poets who
come closest to this immanent pattern. Gregory's
Shield of Achilles
showed, perhaps most notably, a talent for exhuming minor poets, and
his wife's collaboration has not spoiled the old touch. Unquestionably this
book contains the most sympathetic recent estimates, perhaps the
only
recent ones, of such poets as Trumbull Stickney, Louise Guiney, and
Adelaide Crapsey. I have no doubt the authors' quotations make the
best possible case for them, and in the case of Stickney, at any rate, they
deftly disengage some remarkably striking lines. The longest single ac–
count of the book would restore E.
A.
Robinson to an eminence from
which most recent criticism has allowed him to slip: the only examples
of a "mature vitality" in twentieth-century American poetry, the authors
say on their
la~t
page, are E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, and T . S. Eliot.
If
one accepts the pattern, Robinson's elevation is methodically justified.
Indeed the workings of the model seem subtly to modify the descrip–
tion of those poets who do
not
submit very easily to the frame. Wallace
Stevens has deceived himself (and others) in his apparent concern for
a philosophy of appearance and reality; it is enough to say that he is an
appreciator of the comedy of a civilized milieu. Hart Crane's intoxication
and his large designs are not forgotten, but the winnowing of his poems
collects a note of more restrained elegy. Even Eliot (for whom Tennyson
and Herrick become precedents) is oddly metamorphosed into a "man
of feeling." The authors recognize his "new sensibility"; but how precisely
it differs in technical innovation and embodied feeling from a traditional
"firmness of expression" is never very clear.
A touchstone of taste on the whole at least consistently cultivated
demands allowance; but it must be said that it makes it difficult for
the authors to write a history of American poetry. History is interested
in change and development; and here difference tends to be muted by
a pattern of conformity. Consistent attention to the development of
technique, and to the related concerns of substance and attitude would
seem to be the two threads on which a history of poetry needs to be
strung. These matters are rarely seen except as the occasional business of
individuals. Dramatic setting interferes with a sense of relative values:
Edmund Clarence Stedman's gathering of ineffectual poets in 1900 seems
