POETRY CHRONICLE: PARNASSUS STORMED
COLLECTED POEMS. By Dylon Thomos. New Directions. $3.75.
COLLECTED POEMS. By Edwin Muir. Grove Press. $3.50.
EUROPA AND THE BULL. By W. R. Rodgers. Forror, Strous ond Young.
$3.00.
VARIOUS JANGLING KEYS. By Edgor Bogordus. Yole University Press.
$2.50.
THE MONUMENT ROSE. By Jeon Gorrigue. Noondoy Press. $3 .00.
THE ANATHEMATA. By Dovid Jones. Fober
&
Fober. 25s.
WINDS. By St.-John Perse. Tronsloted by Hu gh Chisholm. Pontheon.
$5.00.
Dylan Thomas'
Collected Poems
is an impressive book, full
of impressive writing. Anybody who reads it through will come out with
the clear impression that Thomas is one of our most scrupulous writers.
Not many books of poetry contain so few contrivances or so much hon–
esty and genuine feeling. Thomas writes from a viewpoint that is
wholly his own, although his imitators have tried unsuccessfully to ap–
propriate it, and he is able to invest the most worn-out subjects with
the freshness and sometimes the oddness of his singular imagination. His
outlook is childlike, full of curious blends, mismatchings, and surprising
connections. These are the qualities which, I suspect, have made some
of his poems so popular-"Fern Hill," "The force that through the
green fuse drives the flower," "When all my five and country senses
see," etc. And there is no doubt that these are moving poems, com–
posed with an unanalyzable felicity and integrated by a very strong,
even astute emotional faculty.
Yet in spite of these qualities, reading Thomas'
Collected Poems
is not an altogether satisfactory experience. One is convinced of his
genius at the same time that one is irked by it. The freshness and origin–
ality turn soon to anomaly, and one begins to perceive in the poet's
childlike attitudes a fractiousness and malevolence that is destructive be–
yond any recognizable motivation. The language is more often discon–
certing than compelling. Some poems-for instance, the sonnet sequence
entitled "Altarwise by owl-light"-are so crabbed as to be impenetrable;
the reader (at least this one) catches at hundreds of straws, but in the
end goes down anyway. Thomas is addicted to the catachresis, the
forced trope.
1£
occasionally he startles and delights us with a metaphor
that is pure and unique, he just as often confuses us by mating objects
or qualities which are by no conceivable invention associable. Hence,
every antiphrasis becomes possible: dogs speak and men bark. Such a
