POETRY CHRONICLE
against history. The notion that we are predestined to obscurity and
alienation by our situation in history has become the central dogma of
a new and thoroughly absurd orthodoxy. There is always the example
of-Frost! But Shapiro is not enough aware of what Frost also demon–
strates: the
dangers
of a wider audience, the dispossession of the poet
by his role. Obsessed by the real terror of the "monstrous" toward which
the private poet is impelled, he has failed to be scared enough by the
equally real terrors of public performance.
Trial of a Poet
falls into two parts: two groups of shorter poems,
satirical and lyrical, which are essays in the plainer style (several of them
have met
The New Yorker's
standards of lucidity), and the longer title
poem, a dramatic descant on the trial of Ezra Pound. Caught in the focus
of a treason trial, the sense of guilt that has obsessed our poets and in
part cued their choice of the hermetic-we have been, in a sense,
waiting for these charges for five hundred years--could certainly
justify a poem. But this work betrays by a gross timidity of language
the possibilities of its subject. Suggesting that "poetry instructs .language
only," the poet astonishingly neglects the claims of language in favor
of those of comprehensibility; he wants to
tell
everyone what he might
have demonstrated for a few. Indeed, the drive to be, at all costs, not
misunderstood leads Shapiro in the end to abandon, without formal
warrant, his lax verse for a bald prose commentary which explains,
with the patient contempt of Hercule Poirot unmasking a murderer,
what only the dullest could have missed. Thus his conscience makes
Dr. Watsons of us all.
Shapiro seems to be losing patience with the practice of poetry in
a consuming desire to make statements about its nature. Such a piece
as "Trial of a Poet" seems a commentary, mildly versified in spots, on
a poem not written. It is difficult to make theories, in despite of love
or wit, the occasions of verse.
Some of the satirical poems in "Recapitulation" are more success–
ful-a C_!:!rtain drollness of rhyme counterpointing the controlled con–
versational tone; I like the close of "The third-floor thoughts of dis–
contented youth. ... " But it is difficult to find a set of common values
broad enough to make satire available to Shapiro's desired audience;
unless, of course, one chooses to ridicule- himself! That is precisely
Shapiro's subject: his excursions by Packard among the Proletariat, his
not-quite conversion. These are, perhaps, good jokes
en famill e,
but I
am a little disturbed at the sense in which a "layman" might find him,
as poet or ex-radical, laughable. A poem like "The Southerner" man–
ages a more subtle manipulation of values, but it stands alone.
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