POETRY CHRONICLE
of Rilke's
Duino Elegies, and
Edith Sitwell's
Street Songs.
In my psy–
chological concept I am indebted to Sigmund Freud, Karl Barth, and
particularly to
Dark Night of the Soul
by the 16th century St. John
of the Cross." I find this charming, especially the frank admission that,
like tens of millions of his contemporaries, he is indebted to Freud; to
Wyatt and Surrey he owes in fact nothing beyond what every poet who
uses English owes them, except the spellings shadowd, begd, etc.; and
the whole statement is evidently rhetorical ("Heavens," you cry re–
morsefully to a friend, "why don't I return that book
Gide
lent me").
But it
will
repay our analysis. "Barth" stands for Auden, who is scarcely
ever named on
th~se
occasions, just as "St. John of the Cross" stands
for Eliot, and the substitutions are a sign-not that we needed one-
of how influential American
criticism
has been on the poetry of the
4
period. The grateful allusions to the early English poets, together with
the failure of profit from their influence in Mr. Duncan's book ("My
life may come to rest in me/ where I shall restless in the future be"),
may remind us of how wasteful of opportunity and ignorant our poetry
is; thus one might learn much from Wyatt (and from the best discussion
so far of the difficult problem of his versification, in
Scrutiny
for De–
cember, 1946), and Lowell has learnt much from Herbert. The mention
of Rilke-that it is a translation notices our ignorance again-reminds
us of how few foreign-language poets have been operative in the period:
Rimbaud, Rilke, Valery, Lorca. The mention of Lawrence suggests
that we are in dark and mindless California but suggests also how little
things generally have changed in the dozen years since Day Lewis'
influential
A Hope for Poetry
named Hopkins, Lawrence, and Owen
as the ancestors of Auden Ltd. (Inc. I should perhaps say). With the
mention of Miss Sitwell, however, we enter the anglophilism of Califor–
nia, and leave the American scene proper. Let us return momentarily
to see how it is that the Auden climate and the Stevens ascendant,
though suffering much static of this nature, have held their sway here.
There is no mystery in it. The poets who fill the magazines, who
publish book after book, are Auden and Stevens. With much more
competition, so to speak, than they have had, they would have reigned
still. But they have not had much. Eliot's perennial influence is by this
time so diffused that poets usually work through it before they reach
print; and then he has published nothing but the Quartets, which though
profoundly admired have exerted less influence than one would have
expected-with a notable exception to be described
in
due course. The
other senior poets have continued to publish, but Pound's influence is
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