POETRY, UNLIMITED
191
Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility ac–
companied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed
to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from
Giselle,
on ice-skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair-holding his wrists
like Lifar-and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an
hour. Harry Brown is this sort of poet, a model of his kind. He can do
anything another poet has done, and does it; but why that poet did it he
will never know. (His book is almost a synopsis of middle and late
Auden, and has smooth, faithful, senseless imitations of half a dozen
other poets.)
If
Macaulay's was a style in which you couldn't tell the
truth, Mr. Brown's is a style in which you can't tell anything: the mat–
ter of the poems is no more than a vehicle for their manner, an ac–
complished and unimaginably unconvincing one.
Francis GoIffing's
Po ems
1943-1949 is one of the Cummington
Press's prettiest little books. The poems are self-conscious, metallic,
rather affected constructions-Mr. GoHfing works so obtrusively that
it is difficult to see past him to the poem. People once would have said
that his vocabulary and techniques smell of the lamp; almost all the
poems have the tinny glitter that makes one feel they are meant to be
praised for their "strict wit." Two or three of them
are
successful as
wit, if not as poetry; several of the ideas are better than their execu–
tion; and a poem about the sun ends excellently:
Changed by the fierc e
sympathy/ That, passing across vapor, leaves it clear.
But then the
reader gets to the Rilke translations at the end of the book; a wonder–
ing shudder comes over him, he is in a different universe:
Behind the inculpable trees
slowly the old Fatality
works out her silent face.
Wrinkles are drawing that way.
What down here a bird screeches
bends off as a woe-line
at the hard soothsaying mouth.
o
and the soon-to-be lovers
smile on each other, ignorant of farewells.
Over them sets and rises
starlike their destiny
. . .
No, poetry is something written by poets or by accident.
Once upon a time,
in
Manila or Guadalajara, as he sat outside
