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PARTISAN REVIEW
As a poet, Spender is admirable and courageous but only occa–
sionally, in
Poems of Dedication,
really first rate. He is inhibited or un–
certain when he most needs to be in full swing. And so his poems tend
to
be
incomplete,ly fulfilled, even the moving "Elegy for Margaret,"
wlpch is the most ambitious poem in the book. One section of his book
Spender calls "Spiritual Explorations" and the whole volume is really
a candid exploration of some of the enduring problems which had a
special appeal for the Romantics. At the bedside of the dying Margaret
he reflects upon the "dreams
of
life painted by dying desire." Like the
dead among savages, she is already becoming a myth before the eyes of
those who watch her. Does she exist in "the whispering scratching exis–
tence almost lost
I
To our blatant life"? Or among "the; granite facts
around your bed
I
Poverty-stricken hopeless ugliness
I
Of the fact ..."?
And the poet's grief is similarly ambiguous. Is it fact or dream? The
tough mind will regard it as a dream, which will be gone tomorrow.
And then, more generally, the appropriation of the Universal Desert by
the Loving Ego: the "deprived fanatic lover" who must somehow "cover"
"the sexless body in the sands." For it is Love in which the "moons and
tides move" and which unites "the angel and the de,vil ...
in
the atro–
cious night." It may be that the Loving Ego is now what the "Imagina–
tion" was to Wordsworth and Coleridge.
In the fine poem called "Lost," Spender searches for the lost "shin–
ing" of childhood--exactly what Wordsworth called the "gleam." Which
reminds us that the tendency of psychoanalysis is generally in favor
of Romantic poetry. In Spender's "Explorations" the given fact is the
Dream of Venus and Mars, who dream of the Ego in its flight through
the desert night of stars-this Ego which dreams of its own journey
and of loved objects; and recapitulates History
in
its "shut skull"; and
hears the still, sad music of humanity-
The Universe, the dead, humanity, fill
Each world-wide generation with the sigh
Which breathes the music of their will-
and is "the
ill
I
Chameleonic harlequin who'll die." Better, for a fact,
to be Spender's harlequin than merely to complain, with Shelley, "I
fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!"
But Shelley is a man of the hour. Mr. Louis Adeane, whose com–
petent sheaf of minor poems celebrates the mysteries of sex, death, and
rebirth, speaks of the "insurgent freedom of the heart" and asks
"If
love's two
fir~
are ash can summer come?" When he speaks of a German
airman shot down over England, he does so in the manner which for
most of the new poets under review constitutes Romanticism:
