BOOKS
SOME USES AND FAILURES OF FEELING*
The sense of how much any poem is at the mercy of large
sightless shifts in feeling outside the poet's will or the exigencies of his
poem mocks us who were brought up to regard poems as structures, that
is in their aspect of autonomy taken as a total definition. The concept
of structure has been a handsome and useful fiction, sustaining two,
perhaps three generations of poets in the style to which we have become
accustomed, but it begins, I think, to assume already a slight air of
the old-fashioned; defending it we seem inevitably-a little truculent.
For we submit now, willing or not, to a revolution in sensibility, called
sometimes with moderate accuracy nee-Romanticism, which involves in
the aspect these poets chiefly illuminate a restoration to legitimacy of the
more dangerous uses of emotion and the consequent difficulty in the
discrimination of sentimentality. There is a point at which that revolution
is self-conscious, interested in giving itself names and canonizing fore–
runners, but almost everywhere its pressures are manifest, at least as
distortion or dismay, and it forces us uneasily to recognize the sense in
which the poem
is
spectacularly not autonomous, but must yield to
changing fashions in emotion, themselves prompted by inscrutable ad–
justments in the gross social mind that does not feel responsible for, or
indeed even interested in, the production of poetry.
It is among the Young, of course, and those who identify themselves
with their newer strategies: the diiiavowal of violence, the abdication
from the state, the idol-ization of sex, that the new sensibility is, with
a certain inevitable callowness, defined. The jacket blurb on William
Everson's book (a magnificent piece of printing, which oddly asserts in
• THE RESIDUAL YEARS. By William Everson. New Directions. $3.00.
LOSSES. By Randall Jarrell. Harcourt, Brace. $2.00.
THE DISPOSSESSED. By John Berryman. Sloane. $2.50.
PATERSON (BOOK TWO). By William Carlos Williams. New Directions.
$3.00.
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