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PARTISAN REVIEW
adding anything decisive to the sensibility of the time, and, particularly
in Eberhart's case, how much charm can result from a very deliberate
practice of poetry for poetry's sake, variety for variety's sake, style
for style's sake. Eberhart is too lavish with his rhetorical questions and
too frugal with distinctively
poetic
answers. Miss Adams is too modest
and private to ravish or command. But both have a highly refreshing
security in their profession and are major witnesses if not major voices.
In Richard Wilbur's words, their subject is "the spirit and its visions,"
the noblest subjects, if not always the most timely or commanding.
In the socialized parlance of the '30s, Mr. Shapiro is a much
more "committed" poet than Adams or Eberhart. Some of his poems
writhe
in
an agonized limbo of commitment; committed to everything
they end up committed to little more than the twin ideas of commit–
ment and detachment, floating in a solution of good-natured wit. What
is one to make of a poem on "The Fly" which starts
"0
hideous little
bat, the size of snot"? or one on "The Haircut" which starts
"0
won–
derful nonsense of lotions of Lucky Tiger"? or one on the "Buick" which
starts "As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate
spine ..."? The balance of such poems busies itself with apologizing
for these convulsive invocations. Something disarming in this embrace–
ment of the chronically common, but something frustrating also, and
in several confessional moments, something cloying and coy. Too many
of these poems are an anxious rehearsal of themes on which Shapiro
has little of interest to say. The fact remains, however, that he is one
of the most gifted of living poets. Given a subject which frees his
genius for the somberly and soberly concrete-"Elegy For a Dead
Soldier," "The Conscientious Objector," "October 1," "In the Wax–
works," "Terminal," "Israel," "Going to School"-he speaks for his
thousands and his tens of thousands. His irony is incidental rather than
overmastering. The very best poems in the book-a beautifully concrete,
subtle and well-modulated series on "Adam and Eve"-are the least
ironic.
The "imagist" tradition of everyday life continues to bear fruit.
If,
as Pound once wrote Dr. Williams, Williams' genius lies
in
his
opacity, then his descendants have not inherited this genius. Their poems
don't vibrate in quite such a defiant contrast to the prevailing modes.
But the solid success of Mr. Noss's little Japanese episodes and Mr.
Hoffman's first book points back to Williams. Mr. Hoffman doesn't
attempt very much, but is musical, witty,
exuberant~
original, easy, well–
disciplined, and seems to take his minority as a sort of blessing. Mr.
