USES AND FAILURES OF FEELING
than that. In a way he is the most conservative of the three poets at
whom we are looking, closest to the tradition of structure and the
aesthetic object, but for him, too, there is no way of utterly evadin.;–
the perils of the current necessity to extend the poem's range of feeling.
The simple (as we say condescendingly) love lyric alone poses problems
for whose answer we thumb in vain the Eliotic glossary, the emenda–
tions by Auden. But the triumphs of love demand these days celebration
along with its failures, and marriage becomes improbably as exigent an
occasion for verse as one's own birthday or the year's turn. In "Canto
Amor" and elsewhere, Berryman worries the kind of feeling that was just
a little while ago an aesthetic indecency; the poem itself is one of his
less comfortable efforts, for the possible vocabularies for such themes are
not yet sufficiently stable, but neither there nor elsewhere in his book
does Berryman lapse into inauthenticity of feeling. In some of his very
latest poems, one is perhaps too aware that Berryman has a problem
of expression, and we resent the betrayal of its existence (the felt concern
with tightness in such a poem as "Narcissus Moving," for example), as
we flinch at an unlookcd-for confidence. But such poems as "Boston
Common" with its admirable opening, or "The Enemies of Angel.s,"
which cannot be quoted but must be read all of a piece, seem to me
to sustain a complexity of tone, a controlled ambivalence (based in part
on an unerring instinct for levels of usage and their combinations) that
is wholly satisfying.
In this context of shifting feeling William Carlos Williams assumes
a new meaning; and it
is
fitting that he consummate at this precise
moment his life's work with the appearance (this is the second volume;
there are two more to go) of his long poem
Paterson,
parts of which
have been appearing over the last twenty years.
For Williams has long been testifying to the uses of sentimentality.
He is, in a sense, the Dashiell Hammett of American poetry; there
exists in his work the precise mixture of realism and sentimentality, the
masculine soupiness under the hardboiled surfaces ("The Raper from
Passenack" defines in a short lyric all that James M. Cain was ever
after) of the boys in the back room. "Noble," he says someplace in
praise of another poet, "has become No Bull!" And that's Bill all over.
It is good for us, I think, to see Williams in such a setting (though
it is by no means the whole truth about him), for his reputation has
flourished among those who have despised manifestations of the same
complex of feeling in prose fiction-and Williams has in the meantime
attained the status of a Grand Old Man, a survivor, who saw the young
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