422
PARTISAN REVIEW
Miss Sitwell's poems have a primordial simplicity of thQiUght and
image. The he.art, she says, is better than the head, and "the world ends
in the heart." The sun is the heart of the universe. The sun is the Pa–
triach (the "Abraham-bearded sun, the father of all things") and the
sun is Christ ("He with the bright hair"). The images are often like
those in folktales: a dead King in golden armor somewhere in a dark
wood; the beast-philosopher hiding in the orchards. The long incan–
tatory lines of these poems are a ritual celebration of the
elan
which
smashes the death-pattern, or, in the imagery Miss Sitweil shares with
Shelley and Eliot, which will bring the Spring back to the long Winter
of the world or will bring the young god back to the field of golden
grain. Several of the individual poems in this volume are great successes;
taken together, they form a single poem of the first order.
It was clear from Mr. George Barker's
Selected Poems
(Macmillan
1941) that he was a considerable poet and that his kinship was with
Romanticism. The assertion made by his new volume is that the Loving
Ego unites all things
in
its Dream. It unites "the angel and the anthro–
poid";
it bridges the seas and encompasses the universe; it insists upon
Personality, sets up a realm of Being opposed to temporal "Justice," and
distinguishes individuals from the faceless total society (the theme of an
earlier poem by Barker
in
which the poet has a vision of Wordsworth
walking
in
a modern crowd) .
The detonation of Barker's new love poems is sometimes hugely
incommensurate with the results. There are moments of great energy
and a certain felicitous weirdness:
My tall dead wives with knives in their breasts
Gaze at me, I am guilty, as they roll
Like derelicts in my tempests,
Baring their innocence to the dirty pole
Whirled upon which I am a world at rest.
But then he will give the reader a whole series of deplorable thoughts
by rhyming "intervenes" with "between us" or speaking of the "dove,
in
its code of coos." And it will occur to the reader that Barker seqms
unable to distinguish between nonsense like "where swans elide the
labials of waters" and the genuine kinetic impulse of "Time with its
shoving shall unsmO?th / The brightest lying lover." Barker's fluency,
however hard-won it may or may not be, often leaves an impression of
haste and carelessness. He benefits by publishing selected poems. And
to me the barbaric music and thick-forested imagery of earlier pieces
like "The Amazons" and "Holy Poems" appear to be his _best style.
The poems of Samuel Greenberg, who was born in Vienna and
died of protracted tuberculosis in a Staten Island hospital in 1917 at
