PARTISAN REVIEW
I miss the flagrant urban baroque of Shapiro's first books, the de–
tailed love of language and the witty landscape of barbershops and
moving-vans, disavowed for a programmatic plainness. Shapiro's doc–
trines, as doctrines, demand a fairer trial, but it should
be
clear to him,
fading toward prose and flatness, that, whatever their validity, they are
not for
his
talent fruitful. He has had, at least, the discretion to commit
his errors while young.
One turns with relief to that unembarrassed old practitioner, Stev–
ens, turning out for an audience of 246 his elegantly printed fribbles
(these pieces have, to be sure, appeared, though not so handsomely,
in PR), documenting the shyest of all poetic commitments to serious–
ness, the brashest of all loves of language. In an omnibus review, one
can pause only long enough to salute him.
In
R.
P. Blackmur there is the complex assurance that a poetry
of statement
can
attain elegance, doctrinal meditation on evil reject
the offices of prose. There is a lovely tension in adjusting what might
be dogma or platitude to a gracefulness worthy of the most trifling
nuance of sensibility. There is no
good
reason why a Christian should
be a poet-and that is precisely the nub of the infinite possibilities of
Christian poetry.
The insistence on the private man ("When public life is all / Then
God is mocked") in the public symbol: the Phoenix, the Biblical verse,
Yalta, is one with the fact: the Good European trapped in his history,
our
Europe-for it is a proper noun only at our remove. There is a
flickering promise in the recurrent Phoenix-image, but it is a prob–
lematical Phoenix, a Phoenix at a loss, hope as an aspect of our tor–
ment: "When will this dry tree I clutch be done shaking?"
The war moves under the surfaces of all these poets. In Blackmur
it most directly compels the forms of his perception: the death of a
friend, the revelation of Europe as a metaphor; but even Frost works
in
among his corny cracks the ancient gag, "There's a war on!" and
Shapiro memorializes the quasi-deaths of induction. All three, however,
refuse to treat it as an Event; only for the dead is war an absolute
experience; for the survivors it is an epiphany of evil, a noise in the
street, a "ragging in the mind."
Richard Wilbur, however, is properly a war poet, who has found
his matter, his voice, in ·the war years. And for
him,
too, whose coming
of age is contemporary with the war, it is something which happens
to childhood rather than churches, something out of time and internal.
Only a few poems in this admirable first book deal directly with the war,
and he is likely to touch it, as in "Mined Country," where it impugns the
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