PARTISAN REVIEW
somewhere under them plays this real ·humor;
I"
laughed. He has irony
when he likes, and he can shut it off. He can frighten. But one's strongest
sense is of an
accepting
poetry, and two of the most wonderful passages
in his book are the antepenultimate and last paragraphs of "Tristram,"
which dramatize resignation. These are not detachable; they take place,
like almost everything else in Reed, in a progression
in
the poem–
just as each poem when you read it seems to have a place
in
the pro–
gression of his poetry. Very little is detachable: a blazing detail across
the page from "Tristram":
In the golden collapse of the summer, or the tearing days
Before the beginning of spring.
...
In these lines what used to be called the quality of high imagination
is plain as the sun. Read the whole book.
I never read a line of Reed's poetry till day before yesterday, and
never heard him mentioned but once several months ago along with four
other young English poets; I am glad I do not have to appoint his
eternal place. But we have Mr. Eliot's word for it that genuineness will
do, and genuineness is what I affirm. It will trouble some readers that
Reed's work is so close to its main stylistic source, the
Four Quartets.
So it is, very; some even of the properties in "Triptych" are the same
as Eliot's. What then? The awkward truth is that Reed is an alchemist.
He could rewrite "Resolution and Independence" in his own style and
fascinate you. The same readers may be troubled by his passages of open
emotion; and to these I think we must adjust ourselves.
Strategies and strategies. Confronted equally with difficult situa–
tions, Reed
relaxed
beyond relaxation and Lowell
tightened
beyond
tightening. Reed breaks meter into anapests, feminine endings, extra–
syllabled lines of all sorts, Lowell into spondees and humped smash.
Lowell's work is "difficult," Reed's on the whole "plain," in extreme
degrees.
Lord Weary's Castle
is the natural product of an elaborate,
scrupulous, and respected literary criticism. It could hardly have been
produced in England, where there is nothing to prepare for it or to
receive it (Empson's less formidable first book was dismissed for instance
by MacNeice as not the sort of thing needed just then-indeed it wasn't,
or it still is). On the other hand,
A Map of Verona
could hardly have
been produced in the United States, under our distrust of the shapely
and gentle and easy-just in Reed's poems: the poet would have been
haggard with self-consciousness before he began. The indifferent state
266
