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PARTISAN REVIEW
with her household soap of merchants' fat, finishes by praising the
ogre's wife for having been
patience' self to me,
though she could never understand
the dreadful shaking of my hand
skimming the broth or pouring that thick tea.
The extra foot in the last line-no other line in the poem has five–
helps to make
that thick tea
a triumph; because of the line a good many
readers may feel a flash of fondness for the poet, and say to themselves:
The world never understands why our hands shake so as we serve it.
Donald Drummond is one of Yvor Winters' students. Some of his
verse is serious (" 'Huitzilopotchi's hunger must be fed!' / The out–
thrust arms enforced hysteria/ On the brown mass below. Priest food!/
... His eyes flashed once and dulled again. He turned/ And met the
Spaniard's look. He saw the smile/ Tighten the bearded lips"), some
of it is jocular ("The chiselled good which Yvor Winters turns/ Be–
tween his fingers makes him hard to please,! And though his critics
often die from burns, His friends as often freeze"), and all of it scans-–
if there are any prosodists who are also Mongolian idiots, this is the
verse for them to scan. But if it wcre possible to like Mr. Drummond
better than any other poet, one would like him better than John Wil–
liams, who is a poet representative enough to have no individual
characteristics whatsoever. John Pauker's
Yoked by Violence
shows
more wit, skill with language, and general intelligence than these other
two members of Alan Swallow's New Poetry Series; but his poems are
often derivative, tastelessly mannered, and heartlessly inconsequential.
These books come rather surprisingly short of the Series' intention, which
is to "present, each year, three important new poets who have not
previously had collections of their own." This statement, for overweening
yet somehow endearing ambition, rivals one I came on in a Soviet
critic: "Subjective Objectivism in music has always been Nikolai
Myaskovsky's intention."
The sestets of Theodore Spencer's
An Acre in the Seed
make
fairly quiet and pointed observations, in verse at its worst common–
place and at its best pleasant; usually they sound like this poet and
nobody else, but some of them are based on Frost's very short poems–
"Perennial," "Fair," "Adult," and "The Iris" make this plain-and
one or two sound like the notes to
The Double Man.
Such poems seem
to have been more congenial to Spencer than anything very sizable or
intense, and represent him, I imagine, as well as he can be represented.
