PARTISAN REVIEW
is expertly written, but it is impossible to deny that the talent and feeling
are real. What happened to them is that the author inherited from both
Auden and Stevens a tradition of improvisation. We may write a sonnet,
say, but for God's sake let it
be
as little like a sonnet as possible: appear
to take it easy. Tate's frightful wrenchings in his early sonnets, producing
sometimes similar effects, proceeded from an exactly opposite desire:
not to take it easy.
Either programme, it goes without saying, could be
fruitful or sterile; I am not preferring one to the other. Well, as Tate's
restless dead-seriousness has prevented his ever steadying down in an
acquired technique sufficiently to produce a consistent and considerable
body of work, so the Climate's hell-with-it has kept Nemerov from
acquiring a craft commensurate with what (considering "The Place of
Value," "Portrait of Three Conspirators," "Lot's Wife") one takes to
be
his native ability. The rhyme-dim "sonnet" I have quoted is simply
a masterpiece compared with his normal sonnets (pp. 54, 57), and he
is the author of the two worst-conceived and worst-executed sestinas
(I hope) in the English language. These sestinas show an incompre–
hension of the whole nature of a sestina so startling that after recovering
from them I looked up and reread all my favorite sestinas from Amaut
to Jarrell to see whether I had lost my mind. It can only mean, in a
young writer otherwise knowing enough, an
acquired insensitivity
to
form. His intensely literary book includes too much apprentice work
(especially in sections II and III), chewing over many influences besides
Auden's and Stevens'; occasionally he writes poems in what is best
called short-line prose; but the maturer work displays very clearly the
languors and rigors suffered by talent under the Climate.
Direct a light upon the work at present done for union members
by the Climate, and their own contributions dwindle to their own con–
tributions. We see that Howard Griffin, for all the properties lent him
(Chardin, krakens, Trine, neon, assoil, Persephone, the Mills Hotel,
the sad iambic sea, chatoyances of air), is not a poet at all, since he
can't contrive to do the elementary thing required, which is to
sound
as if he meamt it.
He was in the Signal Corps, and here are the begin–
ning, middle, end of a poem:
This hand that shields my heart when darts are near
has killed.
And now forev er let my flesh be cursed,–
this pervious parchment, this far ce-like frame
let it decay.
260
