Randall Jarrell
THE PROFESSION ,OF POETRY *
What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide ;
a painter who "held the mirror up to nature" would spend his life on
the leaves of one landscape. The work of art's fluctuating and idiosyn–
cratic threshhold of attention-the great things disregarded, the small
things seized and dwelt on-is as much of a signature as anything in it.
In
Marshall Schacht's poems this threshhold is a curve drawn with a
compass: its outlines, the outlines of everything else, have the reasonable
(and, in the end, maddening to the reader) simplification and conven–
tionalization of a Grant Wood tree, of old bars of soap; they are not the
silhouette of the artist, but of the procedure by which the artist found
it easy to write the poem. Someone praises these poems by speaking of
their "deceptive simpli city": it is this deceived and conscious "simplicity"
of form and content which serves Mr. Schacht for a style-that is,
instead of a style-so that he reminds one of those carefully humble,
awkward, sincere persons, full of hesitations,
wells,
and
you knows,
half
jeune fille,
half Grandma Moses, whose lives are one long moral victory
over their suffering and inattentive friends.
These poems seem to me the equivalent of the paintings of amateurs,
of the musical performances of doctors who one evening a week play
in quartets; nobody dreams of comparing their performances with those
of Klee or Lehmann, so why should I compare Mr. Schacht's poems with
Rilke's? (I suppose this is what the dust-jacket's critic means when he
says, in the style of Atticus, that "without this kind of poetry there can
be no general diffusion of literary culture in any society.") I, like any
society, don't enjoy this kind of poetry except in an occasional faint
cotton-candy way; but I am bothered not so much by the limitations
*
Fingerboard.
By Marshall Schacht. Twayne. $2.25.
A Fountain in Kentucky.
By John Frederick Nims. Sloane. $2.75.
Guide to the Ruins.
By Howard Nemerov. Random House. $2.50.
Welcome to the Castle.
By Alfred Hayes. Harper. $2.50.
Kaire.
By E. E. Cummings. Oxford. $2.50.
The Collected Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg.
Schocken. $3.50.
Poems.
By Wilfred Owen. New Directions. $1.50.
