BOOKS
577
method of wntmg, it seems to me, is destructive of language.
It
does
not enrich the vocabulary, but on the contrary dissipates it. Thomas
does not go the whole way, of course, but the only forseeable end to
his processes of composition is chaos-a fate we are spared, I should
think, simply because chaos is too boring for us to put up with it.
Edwin Muir is known to Americans chiefly as Kafka's translator,
which is a pity. His own writings, especially his poems, give him a much
greater claim to our attention and admiration. Muir is one of the
three or four best poets writing in English today, and his
Collected
Poems
so far exceeds in excellence the other books reviewed here-no
small distinction when one considers some of the other names involved
in this chronicle-that I am continually astonished to think of the
neglect his works have met, at least on this side of the Atlantic. Muir's
line is quiet and competent, yet so trenchant that one is reminded only
of Yeats. Muir, who was born and bred in the Orkneys, writes of simple
things in a simple diction, but he infuses them with such intense con–
centrations of meaning that they become, without any sign of labor,
legendary.
One of his primary themes is the journey, and in this respect he
is like Auden and Spender and some others. But he has got a lot more
out of his journeyings than they did. These others were willing to
settle, in their poems, for the traveler's appalling sense of time, change,
loneliness, and desolation--crude and egocentric feelings expressed mostly
in inhuman terms. Muir has gone further and has added an experience
of sufferance and sorrow:
I do not want it so,
But since things so are made,
Sorrow,
SOTr,OW,
Be you my second trade.
He avoids the mere bitterness and urbanity of his British contempor–
aries. His poems are not an urgency, demanding of us our partisanship,
but an endowment-which is one of the aspects of greatness in litera–
ture. Muir is now at the height of his ability as a craftsman, and his
most recent poems, which have turned more and more toward Biblical
themes, are even simpler and more impersonal than the previous ones.
We have every reason to expect many superb poems from him in the
future.
Europa and the Bull,
by W.
R.
Rodgers, has already received a
good deal of enthusiastic comment from American reviewers; I suspect
such reviews are mere nonsense. The title poem, which is also the longest
in the book, begins this way:
