USES AND FAILURES OF FEELING
its typography the form his verse intrinsically denies, and raises the
intriguing digressive problem of the fascination which printing, the first
mass-production industry, has for the anarcho-pacifist) is a kind of
manifesto: poems are to be no longer "abstract aesthetic objects," but
intimate speech, sensuous and passionate. The paired adjectives suggest,
of course, Milton, but it is D.
H.
Lawrence, via Rexroth and Patchen,
who is actually invoked, and we should perhaps read for the more con–
ventional pair-phallic and sentimental. Now there are possible profitable
revivals of Lawrence as a poet, I am sure, particularly those that would
lead to a contemplation of his extraordinary conquests of tone, or his
restoration of a faith in the symbolic and sacramental importance of
beasts and plants. But for Everson, at least, Lawrence serves primarily
as a guarantor for the transference of bad writing, that is to say, flagrant
sentimentalizing about, copulation from prose to what is, presumably,
verse. Neither Everson's ideas about the taking of life, nor his feelings
about sex are in themselves, though he would obviously be hard to
convince on this score, interesting (with the exception of an episode
in the second part of his longest poem "Chronicle of Division," in which
the meanings of adultery are somewhat subtly extended), and they are
unhappily not transmuted into poems-a process which Everson under–
stands, I think unfortunately, not as a victory over language, but over
himself. He is, moreover, too modest (lucidity is his moderate program)
to achieve the successes of such English fellow-travellers in emotional
excess as Dylan Thomas, eschewing the spectacular and dynamic meta–
phor for the image o£ field and flower, open and usual, to illuminate
his limited themes: the scared hatred and veneration of sex, and the
queasy fear of violence that rides a new generation as the fear of inno–
cence and gentleness once rode an earlier.
In the end, his poems are
parasitic;
they define themselves nega–
tively against the convention of the last generation, what he, or his
publisher, chooses to call "emasculated imitations of John Donne"–
but it is only against our awareness of that "academic" tradition which
he does not fail to evoke in deploring, that his verse attains even vicarious
substance.
The failure of feeling is in Everson at any rate principled, and one
has the feeling that there is not a conspicuous waste of talent involved
(what does he have to lose?); but the uncertainty, the flaccidity of
feeling in Randall Jarrell's new book
Losses
is more distressing. For here
is a poet with a delicate and daring sense of the language, and even
an acute political intelligence, not disjoined from his poetry, but capable
.
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