PARTISAN RJ:VIEW
intermittent and nobody of interest imitates Frost or Williams much;
Ransom has written almost nothing; Aiken and Jeffers have lost heavily;
perhaps Miss Moore's work has been most fruitful, especially in the
best women poets who have appeared for a long time, Elizabeth Bishop
and now Jean Garrigue. As for the middle generation, it has gone to
pieces. Tate has published one booklet in a decade, Crane died, MacLeish
evaporated, Leonie Adams and Putnam fell silent, Louise Bogan nearly
so, Van Doren and Warren developed no following; only Cummings,
to one's pleased surprise, kept on and improved, and his influence has
regularly been atrocious. The other most active members of the genera–
tion have been Winters and Blackmur as critics. The young poets
lately, in short, have had not fathers but grandfathers. Not much
generative time is needed, however, for Auden himself is a grandfather:
a writer like Hugh Chisholm, though unable to summon the flow and
glitter of Prokosch, being more properly his son than Auden's; and
other young writers being Delmorean or Shapiro-like or even Barkerish.
So William Jay Smith's poem "Cupidon" (which seems to Marianne
Moore "a permanence," and to me a predictable harmless farce-piece
like the rest of his quasi-religious, quasi-satirical, agreeable and empty
lyrics) is founded not on Yeats but on Theodore Spencer. The failure
of Yeats' influence to take stronger direct hold during the period
requires some explanation. First, it is puzzling and remarkable, but
true, that young poets are frequent who have simply not read his later
poetry. In the second place, Yeats' personality is so distinct and powerful
that few writers have cared to submit to it in the hope of coming out
themselves. His craft had a generalized influence on two important
books published ten years ago,
Look, Stranger
and
In Dreams Begin
Responsibilities,
and on the whole concept of stanza-formation since
then, but poets with less safeguards than Auden and Schwartz have
tried to keep away: Auden being fully developed (like Spender and Tate
when in tum they took up Yeats), Schwartz drenching Yeats with Eliot,
Stevens, and Rilke, to say nothing of a philosophical discipline and a ·
radically different subject matter.
The period in England presents a greater appearance of activity,
owing partly to the fact that a poet who might never achieve a volume
here at all can there go through three or four volumes and even acquire
a reputation; but it has been undoubtedly, on the whole, much less
interesting. Stevens, and a number of other first-rate American poets
down to Schwartz and Lowell, are absent from the picture because
unavailable there; in 1935, MacLeish's collected poems appeared in
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