THE PROFESSION OF POETRY
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these poems set up into a style-any. style is as much what you can't say
as what you can-as by the sensibility they limit, which thinks that "the
minor thrush" is "cause enough for major sunsets," or which writes:
I also note Tom's greatest novel said
That he wished to be remembered with the dead
Who thought and loved no more than he in bed.
John Frederick Nims's first book of poems depressed me because it
made me feel that poetry is a profession to be learned like any other–
that bees, if they could read, would make the best poets; I felt as I
had felt when a most distinguished critic said to me, after I had asked
him what he thought of one of Mann's books: "Well, you know, the
fact is, I've never really got up on Mann. I've always meant to." Mr.
Nims used to write fairly synthetic, extraordinarily concentrated adapta–
tions of those Audenesque poems of Shapiro's which give a rapid, almost
blatantly effective description of the more obvious features of an Amer–
ican scene; he would crowd so many effects into every line that reading
a stanza was like having one's mouth stuffed with pennies-and the
stanza seldom had any of the individuality, the fresh animal ease,
that Shapiro would have given it. In
A Fountain in Kentucky
Mr. Nims
has improved a great deal: these poems are mild and human and bear–
able, compared to the old; but they are all spoiled by the common–
placeness, the moderately effective approximation, the undistinguished
essential anonymity that spoil the work of most of the younger American
poets. One never feels, "How
like
Mr. Nims," "Who else in the world
would have thought of
that,"
or any of the other silly exclamations that
go along with a good line. One feels, instead: this is the sort of thing
a man says to write poems; that adjective does pretty well-pretty well.
And the
I
of the poems (as it usually is with the youngish American
poets of whom I am speaking) is that composite photograph, that insti–
tutional lay-figure, that poet in the street, which conceals beyond any
possibility of revelation the features of the living being, the poor unpro–
fessional animal that feeds and obeys (and unto please what end) the
industrious typewriter-like double that turns out the poems.
Which of
you by taking thought can add a line to a poem?
one wants to ask this
I;
and one can imagine the rightfully puzzled answer:
Why, I thought
of every word of it.
When one turns to Howard Nemerov's
Guide to the Ruins,
it is
what one doesn't find that makes Mr. Nemerov seem, immediately, a
more intelligent and individual poet-most of Mr. Nims's standard pro-
