192
PARTISAN REVIEW
a convent wall and listened to the nuns preparing a confection called
Angels' Milk,
a little boy decided to go to New York City and become
a great poet. There he wrote a book called, charmingly,
Have Come,
Am Here;
after he had read the reviews of it he telegraphed to his
parents,
Vici,
and said to himself, in his warm, gentle, Southern way:
"What critics these mortals be!" For Edith Sitwell had said that he was
"a poet with a great, even an astounding, and perfectly original gift ...
no poet now writing is more so"; Mark Van Doren had spoken of his
"purest and most natural gifts . . . his power to say, quietly, the most
astonishing and exalted things"; Marianne Moore had said, "Final
wisdom encountered in poem after poem." Babette Deutsch wrote that
his poetry was "as singular as the work of Emily Dickinson or Hopkins";
Conrad Aiken wrote that he was "the most important new poet in Amer–
ica in a decade"-Irwin Edman, in a generation.
For there to be great poets there must be great audiences too:
the poet, sure of his, wrote
Volume T wo.
He wrote a poem made of
476 commas, a poem made of 132 repetitions of the letter 0, and a
poem-called
"The Emperor's N ew Sonnet,"
naturally-made of noth–
ing at all. He wrote eighty Aphorisms like "LOVE-KNOW/ LOVE–
DO"; like "Imperil,
me-Mohammedan, rose!"
For a hundred and
fifty pages he put a comma between each word and the next; as he
says, "The result is a lineal pace of quiet dignity and movement." For
instance:
Pale, vermouth, ultraviolet,
And, tender, lambs, astray,
But, if, these, keep, love, beautiful,
Sweet, heavens, yes.
If, they, keep, love, beautiful,
Wych-tree, wych-bird,
Any, living, whyless, do,
In, that, living, kingdom, fire
...
This is a typical passage. But so is any passage. One reads a poem and
asks oneself
Isn't this the poem before?-but
when one goes back and
reads that, one asks oneself,
Isn't this the poem before?
But it is time
for the end of my story: imagine Miss Sitwell and Mr. Van Doren
and Miss Deutsch; imagine them somewhere in
Volume Two,
turning its
commas slowly over on their tongues, and thinking a little complacently,
a little drowsily, but with perfect truth:
"If
it hadn't been for
my
