PARTISAN REVIEW
Stevens is strong (as "The Mask and Knife"), Miss Moore is ("False
Country of the Zoo"), Thomas is ("In Praise of that Epic, Dream") ;
she has often a metaphysical surface (as "Theme and Variations") and
is fond of paradoxes like "rain fell black / Muddy-eyed from the eye
of night" and "the junket of word-mouthed words"; but experiencing
a style is above all a question of
hearing-time,
as a rule, is important
in it (the poem I hear best is "The Stranger" simply because I have
known it longest) -and in short I feel at present more that Miss
Garrigue
has
a style than I can hear it precisely or say what it is.
The poems seem much more impressive collected than they did when
they first appeared, a few at a time, in separate publications. Since just
the opposite is true of most poets- those who have interest at all, I
mean-this fact is more of a commendation than it may appear. And
Miss Garrigue is, finally, the rare contemporary who writes love-poems,
actual and surprising and sometimes moving love-poems.
Ill
The revolutions by which a poetry is diverted from its course to a
new course are as dramatic as anything in literary history. One oc–
curred about 1600 when the boy Donne jammed a speaking voice,
jammed hesitation and thought and passion, into Elizabethan song.
Another-more interesting to us, I think, just now--occurred at the
mid-century following: when Edmund Waller, according to Dryden,
reformed English versification, giving it sweetness and regular pause
and elegance. Modem critics incline to minimize Dryden's view and
Waller's achievement, and I incline to minimize the critics. Waller not
merely for everyone gathered verse again into forms, like the couplet,
but so controlled the forms in his· best poems as to produce an expecta–
tion differing wholly from previous expectations, and then by violating
the expectation got his effects. These effects are quiet, and amazing.
In a period as licentious as our own, it is very difficult to hear them.
But it is very important to hear them, because
if
our license is not to
continue we will one day be asked to hear effects analogous to them
from one of our contemporaries. They are the sound of the change of
a national mind. "Of English Verse" contains one, perhaps the greatest.
The theme of this poem, written not many years ·after Bacon had
wasted his age translating his English works into Latin, is the futility
of writing in English, because the language daily changes. For seven
quatrains, divided severely into couplets, the poet argues; and then
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