ROMANTICISM AND MODERN POETRY
633
write for a large, popular audience. Mr. Bowra remarks on Apollinaire's
"admiration for some primitive kinds of art like Negro sculpture and
the paintings of Theodore Rousseau
le douanier,"
but fails to relate
these tastes to the quality of Appollinaire's poetic style.
If
this had been
done, Mr. Bowra might have written more than a series of perceptive
notes on individual Appollinaire poems.
Little need be said about Mr. Bowra's essay on
The Waste Land.
This poem has,
if
anything, been overanalyzed, and Mr. Bowra's tem–
perate account has the virtue of remaining within the area of meanings
that a well-informed reader might reasonably derive from the
words
of the poem. Far too often, one finishes an essay by a zealous Eliot
analyzer with the feeling that,
if
this is what Eliot meant, his poem must
be a failure; for the meanings seen by the critic simply do not come
through the words of the poem. With the best will in the world, the
critic is talking about a poem that Eliot should perhaps have written,
on the basis of his critical essays, but which he did not actually get
down on paper. Mr. Bowra avoids this quagmire; though on the other
hand, he does not seem quite able to make up his mind about how
T he Waste Land
is organized. In one place he tells the reader that
"the intellectual structure" of the poem is not worth worrying about
"for it is primarily the emotional sequence that matters"; while later
he writes: "So far from following a psychological or purely emotional
sequence it
(The Waste Land)
moves according to a plan which first
sets out a situation in its many implications and then shows there is no
cure for it." Probably, since Mr. Bowra is talking about different aspects
of the poem in these two places, there is no real contradiction between
these statements. His careless phrasing, however, leads to confusion,
and could easily have been avoided with a bit more critical rigor.
The Creative Experiment
ends with two essays on Spanish poets,
Federico Garcia Lorca and Rafael Alberti. Of the two, the essay on
Alberti is more satisfactory. It may make English readers aware that
Lorca is far from being an oasis in a desert-as might be supposed
from the attention given his work to the detriment of other Spanish
poets of equal
if
not greater importance. Juan Ramon Jimenez, for
example, who occupies a place in modern Spanish poetry similar to
T. S. Eliot's in English, is barely known here; yet he has been living and
writing in this country for years. Younger Spanish poets of established
reputation, like Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillen, are teaching
in
Amer–
ican universities but remain unknown to the literati who read Paul
Eluard and Henri Michaux. And it is scandalous that a magnificent
older poet like Antonio Machado, one of the noblest figures
in
all of
