PARTISAN REVIEW
pose," and (in "A Figure from Politics"), "The gigantic sweet conspiracy
of lovers." But for all his absurdity, and surely his Notes are among the
most incredible
in
modern poetry (he explains, for example, that the
ubi sunt
theme was a medieval favorite, dutifully quoting Wells's
Manual
to prove it), one feels an unusual sense of control, an awareness of form,
and a possibility that when he leaves the schoolroom and kicks out his
teachers, Yeats, Auden,
&
Co., he may achieve a real evocation of
experience. Bernard Spencer, older, British-in-a-Greek-setting, has a
keen eye, a warming freshness, a sincerity that make him stand out in
this
galere
(consider, for instance, a passage from "Olive Trees": "The
dour thing in olive trees
I
is that their trunks are stooped like never
dying crones,
I
and they camp where roads climb, and drink with dust
and stones.
I
The pleasant thing is how in the heat
I
their plumage
brushes the sight with a bird's-wing feeling:
I
and perhaps the gold of
their oil is mild with dreams of healing") ; in an ordered age, neatly
tightening the diffuseness of the lines, the loose Eliot flavor ("the old
man dying upstairs," etc.), he might have become a first-rate minor poet.
"Poetry makes nothing happen," says Miss Herschberger, quoting
Auden; but it is not true that nothing makes poetry happen. Fortunately,
this nothingness centers in just a few of her cuter poems, such as "Love
Like a Capitol Hill," ending in Dorothy Parker rather than Ransom;
and, on the whole, hers is one of the most remarkable first volumes in
many years.
A Way of Happening
is John Crowe Ransom rewritten for
the woman's page, with such excellent success that he may have to
revise his comments on women-poets in
The World's Body;
her "Miss
G," for example, is his own poem on the death of a lady skillfully re–
worked. It is obvious that Miss Herschberger has a pretty wit, and that
because of her intelligence, she has taken the short cut to lightness and
irony sooner than most young poets. There are lines which delight ("Tur–
tles were subtle at the ship's low keel"), such phrases as "the fool funi–
cular," parts of "Little Cuckold," set in expert verse patterns; but there
are also lapses
in
taste, such as "The Moor," incongruities ("the emmet's
laughter"), overcuteness, sentimentality, diffuseness. Actually, there are
two Miss Herschbergers warring against each other, the witty and
objective ironist and the subjective and feeling woman, who, happily
manage, for the most part, to keep the peace.
Whatever defects appear in Eberhart's work, the things one cannot
doubt are his talent, his sincerity, and his genuineness; what is noticeable,
however, is his ineffectuality, a basic weakness, an apparently willful
will-lessness. He has his fine and quiet triumphs, as in the lyric "Cover
Me Over, Clover"; yet one detects, perhaps mistakenly, a failure of
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