PARTISAN REVIEW
have freed the younger poets from this kind of fatuity and self-betrayal.
They are far better acquainted with the complexities of truth, and
more humble in its presence.
The cosmos of Vernon Watkins is not a machine or chaos, and is
not separate from man, but is imaginatively alive, full of terror and
beauty, of powers suggested by Frazer, Jane Harrison, Jung, Freud,
popular Christianity, and Welsh folk customs. Watkins is a good poet,
and his vision is an authentic one, both psychologically and anthropo–
logically. It is most dramatic in the remarkable
Ballad ,of the Mari
Lwyd,
where the selfish, fearful living, in a rhyming contest, try to keep
from their door the corrupt, demanding dead. But in the few poems
which deal with the present, with history, with relations within society,
the cosmology suddenly seems a little quaint and folkish, with its top
or cortical layer missing.
For men now have been forced into an intense cosmic awareness
that results not only from the traditional metaphysical and religious
questions as scientific discoveries have sharpened them, but from a prac–
tical situation in which a pillaged, perhaps overpopulated and certainly
divided world is preparing "unconventional" modes of war of a highly
antibiotic nature. Men have a very thorough sense of being in nature,
in government, in history, in the world, and these relationships are
of the most urgent concern. The complexity and unity of the whole is
evidenced by the
Pravda
statement on the Lysenko case, in which Stalin,
as part of his struggle against the West, maintained, like the Pharaohs,
the order of nature against the chaos of "accident" with which Morgan–
Mendelianism had threatened it.
With everything thus relevant, the poets are best equipped for
the necessary work of synthesis. They no longer are governed or excused
by the implications of Eliot's early apology in which he justified the dif–
ferences between his prose opinions and a poetic sensibility which was
the damaged product of "an unsettled society." They no longer be–
lieve that society can be given order by a formula or set of dogmas,
whereupon the good health of the arts and individual sensibility will
automatically follow. They know that valuable social changes result only
from the individual responsibility, the intelligence, the self-understand–
ing and love of a great many people, and that poetry has its part in the
process. They know, moreover, that through insight, honesty, and crea–
tive will, poetic sensibility and moral ideas can gradually be brought into
harmony. This is the impression one gets from reading the best, perhaps
one-third, of the later poems in Oscar Williams' anthology, poems by
writers as different as Auden, Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, John
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