110
PARTISAN REVIEW
the Garden," "To a Portrait of Melville," and "On the Portrait of a
Scholar of the Italian Renaissance."
The reading of these 'best poems' is a literary education I com–
mend, for they are minor triumphs
au rebours:
they are neither journal–
ism (like Rexroth
et al.)
nor neo-metaphysical (word-play, puns, seman–
tic rhymes,
symboliste,
ironic, paradoxical) nor slick in the style which
teachers of so-called creative writing have taught to publishing young
who shalI be nameless. They are successfully 'classical' in a fashion rare
in English: easy to conceive of; hard to come by.
W. S. Graham is a Scots poet, a 'regionalist.' He has obviously
learned from Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. He is textually rich in alliter–
ation and slant rhymes of the sort which Winters, on
principle,
rejects.
But one has only to compare him with the neo-Irish 'Christian' poet
W. R. Rodgers, to discern Graham's own kind of restraint.
He is seeking (in the
spirit
of
Edwin Muir's Scott)
to recover the
Scots poetry of Dunbar and his successors down to the seventeenth
century, to
substitute,
for the double-language of Burns's "Cotter's Satur–
day Night," a single
diction.
But he does not attempt the unreal Celtic
Revolution
of the Word of Hugh MacDiarmid. This diction admits of
"tig," "whinwork," "linty," "airts," "minch," and "rhinns," for which
an American-or English-reader
wilI
need a glossary; but it is not
thereby made either bizarre or unintelligible. It seems to me a wholIy
successful adjustment of the general tongue and the regional.
The other thing I want to say of Graham is that he manages a
regional (and perhaps even personal) 'mythology' without arrogant
demands on rival regionalists. This typological use of his native Lanark–
shire cannot be achieved in a single poem:
The White Threshold
has to
be read as a book.
I have left the most achieved work for the last. C. P. Cavafy (1863-
1933) was an Alexandrian Greek whose
oeuvre
has already been not only
handsomely published in Athens but the subject of much Hellenic and
'barbaric' scholarship. The English version, done by one truly bilingual,
is both remarkably faithful to the Greek (in form as well as 'sense')
and poetry in its own right.
Even before the revolution which won the Greek independence of
the Turks, there began a renascence of Greek poetry, associated not alone
with 'patriotism' but with what was naturalIy taken as its correlative-–
the literary use of the popular, or
demotic,
language. Cavafy was not a
proponent of the
demotic
nor a political revolutionary. He is an Eliotic
figure; and it is hardly pure coincidence that E. M. Forster, whose
