PROVINCIAL
changed the course of our thought about English poetry for a genera–
tion). And keep those Europeans out!-so that Joyce is never men–
tioned, Mann only when Miss Cather praises him, Yeats only in a quo–
tation from Lewis, Gide only for a phrase, Proust casually twice, the
great English and Russian novelists scarcely at all; and when Geismar
has to refer to Dante and Swift for standards of intensity he does so in
the blankest and most banal way, as a schoolboy might. His allusions
to the Eumenides are the last straw. He strikes you as having read with
professional care the recent fiction writers of the United States, and some
rival critics (especially Van Wyck Brooks and Edmund Wilson, whom
he appears to like equally), and nothing else. His title is interesting
and rather curious.
John Berryman
POETRY CHRONICLE
A MASQUE OF MERCY. By Robert Frost. Holt. $2.50.
TRIAL OF A POET. By Korl Shopiro. Reyno! ond Hitchcock. $2.00.
THREE ACADEMIC PIECES. By Wolloce Stevens. Cummington Press.
$5.00.
THE GOOD EUROPEAN. By R. P. Blockmur. Cummington Press. $5.00
THE BEAUTIFUL CHANGES. By Richord Wilbur. Reyno! ond Hitchcock.
$2.00.
There is a certain satisfaction in being able to say that
A
Masque of Mercy
is a bad book, shallow, corny, and unmercifully cute.
One wants to be assured that a role like Frost's cannot.be played on past
seventy without penalty: the platform charm, the public face, the sly
hatred of the young, the foreigner, the failure-the otiose revenges of
success on the unaccepted. To seem at last somewhat stupid is a just
reward. Frost's humor has always appeared a little dull, a little cruel.
It is
explicit
to begin with, and his successes are notoriously achieved by
a discreet evocation that neither insists nor delimits. But more, Frost's
irony is a performance of his embarrassment thinking, formal)y thinking, I
mean, for there is a gentle intelligence in his meters, an implicit wisdom
in his melancholy (his true subject is the gentleman farmer's, neither
rural nor suburban:
lacrimae rerum,
the Vergilian landscape, half
mystery, half morality) that mock his shallow statement. His humorous
verse, like his manner of reading aloud, shocks us by
s~ggesting
that
ultimately his poetry cannot mean as much to
him
as it may to us.
There is a clue, perhaps, to its felt sullenness.
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