PARTISAN REVIEW
Osborne's century-the seventeenth-is artfully reconstructed, unswept,
and tastefully furnished; "Chickfields," the countryhouse, from which
Dorothy Osborne wrote her letters to her lover and future husband,
William Temple, floats before the reader's eye. But a little less than
half of the indolent, melancholy lady herself is missing; her charms
seem to have been taken, and in too much of "one piece" from Sir
Edward Parry's commentaries in his edition of her letters in the Every–
man's Library-and David Cecil adds nothing to them. Her husband,
Sir William Temple, became Swift's patron, and Swift saw her as "Mild
Dorothea, peaceful, wise and great"; what eludes David Cecil is the
woman whose intellect calmed as well as charmed an impulsive, sulky,
handsome, ambitiou_s young man-a future diplomat. It is the quality
of her future wisdom, her indolently poised decorum that escapes her
present biographer; and Dorothy Osborne, artist as she was in writing
letters that seemed to speak, not loudly, but persuasively, in a clear
voice, would not have become Lady Temple, nor captured and held
Sir William, without her brains.
Horace Gregory
POETRY CHRONICLE*
Stages of crisis-disintegration appear in these volumes, rang–
ing from the naive epigone of disorder to the sharply-aware critic-poet,
desperately reacting against an unrhetorical and loose naturalism and a
disregard for formal values.
At the foot of error springs the Fallacy of Communication, the
poetic vehicle used for non-poetic purposes, as in Hubbell's Civic Muse,
McGrath's Political Muse, and Miss Rukeyser's Muse of Demonic Inco–
herence. Hailed for his "carved chastity of line," Hubbell is really a
*
Long Island Triptych .
By Lindley Williams Hubbell. Swallow Press and
William Morrow. $2.00;
To Walk a Crooked Mile.
By Thomas McGrath. Swal–
low Press and William Morrow. $2.00;
The Gr.een Wave.
By Muriel Rukeyser.
Doubleday. $2.50;
Poems, 1940-1947.
By Theodore Spencer. Harvard. $2.75;
Ships and Other Figures.
By William Meredith. Princeton. $2.00;
Aegean Islands.
By Bernard Spencer. Doubleday. $2.50;
A Way of Happening.
By Ruth Hersch–
berger. Pellegrini
&
Cudahy. $2.00;
Burr Oaks.
By Richard Eberhart. Oxford.
$3.00;
Poems, 1922-1947.
By Allen Tate. Scribner's. $2.50.
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