POETRY CHRONICLE
WAITING FOR THE END, BOYS
Ten or twelve years ago there was still much elaborate talk
about "modem poetry." At one level, the exciting first volumes of
The
Southern Review
were full of studies and exhortations defining it, an–
alyzing it, telling how to achieve it. At another level, a foolish book
appeared,
This Modern Poetry,
serving much the same purpose for the
unenlightened that an ineffable recent "History" does. The word modem
now seems less important. It is not easy now to imagine a poet attempting
to be modem. In fact, one sensitive and experienced critic-Randall
Jarrell-has described Lowell's poetry as "post-modernist"; and one
certainly has a sense that some period is drawing to a close. I want
here to document this sense, explaining why it seems to me a very good
thing that the period is closing, and to study a little England's new
poet, Henry Reed; but first a word or so on the period's characteristic
marks: the imprint it sets upon young work.
By 1935-referring only, for the moment, to this country-the
Auden climate had set in strongly. Poetry became ominous, flat, and
social; elliptical and indistinctly allusive; casual in tone and form,
frightening in import. So far as I know, the only large challenge to this
climate, as yet, has issued from rather an unexpected quarter, the work
of Wallace Stevens. There have, of course, been writers who stood out–
side, and our whole tradition is by now one of great complexity. As an
example I take the jacket statement of a young California poet: "I
owe much in the development of my poetics to the work of Wyatt
and Surrey, to
The Temple
of George Herbert, to the work of such
modems as Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, the Spender translation
Heavenly City Earthly City.
By Robert Duncan. Bern Porter, Berkeley. $2.50;
The Prodigal Never Returns.
By Hugh Chisholm. Farrar, Straus. $2.75;
Poems.
By William Jay Smith. The Banyan Press, New York. $2.50;
The Sun My
Monument.
By Laurie Lee. Doubleday. $2.00;
Other Skies.
By John Ciardi.
Little, Brown. $2.00;
The Image and the Law.
By Howard Nemerov. Holt. $2.00;
Cry Cadence.
By Howard Griffin. Farrar, Straus. $2.75;
Ths Amazing Year.
By
Selden Rodman. Scribner's. $2.50;
The Ego and the Centaur.
By Jean Garrigue.
New Directions. $2.50;
A Map of Verona and other Poems.
By Henry Reed.
Reyna! and Hitchcock. $2.50.
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