THE PROFESSION OF POETRY
727
stanza is
Marx was in England; Gautier was his friend; Goethe was dead.
This seems to suggest that there is in this world no line so bad that
someone won't someday copy it. (Although the disciple's semi-colons are,
logically, an improvement on the original periods, they strip from the
line its lucid atmosphere of Beatrix Potter; Mr. Hayes has not truly
understood it, one is ready to feel: and then one looks at his
Goethe
is
dead-that superb reproduction, on another plane, of the pure
state–
ment
of
He was very great-and
decides that for a moment he did not
merely understand, but was, that line.)
Yet in spite of all his influences-there are several others-Mr.
Hayes is in some sense a fairly individual poet; in spite of all his rhetoric
he is in some sense an attractive poet. For he isn't interested in putting
on a slick professional performance, in showing off a learned collection
of juggler'S tricks; it was not of Mr. Hayes, but of hundreds of other
poets, that I thought when I read, in my
Handbook of American Birds:
"Starlings are noisy at all seasons, and the song is a jumble of squeaks,
rattles, wheezes, loud whistles, and imitations (often excellent) of other
birds." Mr. Hayes wants to move and terrify people with what has
moved and terrified him in this world-so that you respect him even
when, as usually happens, two things go wrong with his procedure: when
he does what he does in too crude and direct and reliable a way; and
when what he has seen and been moved by, the emotional and intel–
lectual climates of the poems, so badly lack personal distortion, the
unconscious individuality which at once signs and guarantees, that the
poem seems to represent faithfully and immediately a fairly common type
Or group, but without ever speaking-as the best poems do--for the poet
and everybody. "Jael," one of the most interesting of his poems, is in–
tended to be grand and monumental, and to a surprising extent it suc–
ceeds; but when one compares it to the best-known poem on a similar
subject, Ransom's "Judith of Bethulia," one sees that in "Judith" the
language itself links to the peculiarity of the past the peculiarity of the
poet, and gives to the florid, Venetian, Marriage-at-Cana tableau an
equivocal, particular truth that is wanting in the generalized astronomical
finality of "Joel." It seems to me that Mr. Hayes can write better poems
than those he usually tries to write; as a naturally effective writer, he
ought to despise effectiveness, and to try for individuality, exactness,
complication. At present he is like some friend, serious, sympathetic,
rather gifted, who six days out of the week speaks and thinks and feels
in such heartfelt cliches that he finally seems to you the myth made flesh,
a generalized, breathing, statistical reality.
