POETRY CHRONICLE
innocence of the natural landscape. It is strange how much Nature,
in the old open-air sense, possesses Wilbur, to whom that world must
belong to Sundays and vacations. The town where it intrudes turns
"turnip town"-for he loves the country shapes of vegetables, potato
and turnip and eggplant, as he loves the configuration of the "o" and
the ampersand, of words like Walgh-Vogel and Giaour, of his invented
stanzas. It is, in fact, this candid love of pattern and texture, joined with
the discreet use of Marianne Moore as influence, that makes his best
poems.
Leslie A. Fiedler
PROS AND CONS
THOMAS WOLFE.
By
Herbert
J.
Muller. The Mokers of Modern
Literoture. New Directions. $2.00.
This is a somewhat better book than one might have been led
to expect from the seemingly unpromising conjunction of critic and
subject. In his past efforts Mr. Muller has not been very effective when
dealing with concrete instances of literary art; mostly one thought of
him as a critic on the prowl for handy abstractions into which to commit
it. In this study, however, he shows himself to be informed by a sense
of fidelity to the text and an awareness of the numerous difficulties of
judgment and evaluation presented by Wolfe's formidable, ambiguous,
and so typically national figure. But Mr. Muller is the victim, none
the less, of a contradiction inherent in the task he has set for himself.
For, obviously, the very fact of writing a book-length study of
an
author
presupposes a high opinion of him- there is certainly no point in
undertaking book-length denigrations of authors. Now Mr. Muller's
dilemma is that in reacting to the fact that Wolfe is not in vogue among
the intellectuals, he repeats-though in a milder form-so many of
their strictures while trying to show that they are mistaken, and he hirft–
self enters so many reservations into his own positive appraisal, that
the result is not so much a clear estimate of Wolfe's position in Amer–
ican writing as an expert rehearsal of the arguments that have been
made for and against his reputation. And while so engaged Mr. Mulier
commits himself to not a few insupportable notions, such as the notion,
divulged with great solemnity, that Wolfe is a mythic artist, a mighty
American mythmaker. "The key to ·Wolfe's achievement is
. the
transformation of a private legend into a public myth," i.e., the myth
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