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PARTISAN REVIEW
they differentiate one kind of poetry from another. Mr. Bowra, however,
makes no attempt to come to closer grips with these slippery terms.
More instructive is his brief discussion of the Colombian poet, Jose
Asuncion Silva, through whose work Mr. Bowra illustrates the transition
from Symbolism to "a sharp modem manner." Silva began as a disciple
of Poe, Tennyson, Baudelaire and Mallarme; but before dying by his
own hand, he wrote a series of short, bitterly satirical poems, the com–
plete reverse of his earlier style. Stripped of all rhetoric, somewhat prosy,
and with an ironical twist at the end, the tone and temper of these
poems is not unlike Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy"
(though Mr. Bowra does not make this comparison himself). Usually,
in Anglo-American critical writing, this stylistic shift is illustrated from
the works of Corbiere or Laforgue, mainly because it was linked to these
French influences by Pound and Eliot. It is good to see Mr. Bowra
breaking away from this stereotype, and, by showing the same qualities
in Silva, widening our critical focus on the mood of modem poetry
as an international phenomenon.
Of the seven poets discussed at length in
The Creatvve Experiment,
English readers are likely to be most familiar with the names of T. S.
Eliot and Lorca; they will probably have heard something of Guillaume
Apollinaire and perhaps of Rafael Alberti; but little, if anything, of
the modem Greek poet Constantine Cavafy or the Russians Mayakovsky
and Boris Pasternak. As was to be expected, the essays on the latter
three seem the most satisfactory, though one would have liked to see
more of an effort to bring their quality home to the reader by com–
parison with more familiar poets.
In the essay on Guillaume Apollinaire, this failure ceases to be
merely a regrettable omission and becomes a positive ground for criti–
cism. Apollinaire's nostalgic geographic juxtapositions and engagingly
casual rhythms have had a considerable influence on modem American
poetry;-some of the early Archibald McLeish, to take the most obvious
instance, reads like an Apollinaire translation. Where this kind of re–
lation exists it would seem well within Mr. Bowra's province to give
it a prominent place. And since Apollinaire has played such a key
role
in
avantgarde literature and art, one feels, too, the lack of a more
ambitious attempt to analyze the qualities of his poetry within this
larger context. Apollinaire's poems, for example, are among the few
in
French literature-the most self-consciously aristocratic of all Euro–
pean literatures-that have some of the authentic lyrical magic of
the folk song and ballad: it was not by chance that Louis Aragon,
during the war, turned to Apollinaire as a model when he wanted to
