266
PARTISAN REVIEW
course, she's very broad-minded." "It was a little
anatomical,
I did
think." "But what about Mr. Stevens?" "Much more cultured, certainly.
I must say when Americans go in for culture they go in for it regardless
of time, trouble, and expense." "I found it hard sometimes to catch his
drift. He's rather shut up in himself, would you say?" "I don't know;
we had a long conversation, over there in the corner, about the nature
of poetry-I don't know
if
I could quite summarize the upshot for you,
but it seemed very deep at the time." "Oh, deep, he is deep!" "1 thought
he talked wonderfully about painting and landscape and music and
things, though, mind you, I found it hard to
pin him down."
"I thought
sometimes of a remote Chinese hermit-sage in his mountain hut, and
then I thought, it would be a very
natty
hut, wouldn't it? I think Mr.
Cummings has been a bit more battered by life." "What a good thing
they can't hear us. They are right, really, to dislike us on the whole.
We
are
cats...."
Mr. Cummings and Mr. Stevens have, in fact, for an English reader,
an extra-poetic fascination-for the light they throw on the roots of
American culture-that might easily, for us, deflect discussion of them
into the kind of gossipy guesswork, in twittering bird-like voices, I have
parodied above. Roughly, of course, we find ourselves fitting Mr. Cum–
mings into a tough and native, Mr. Stevens into a cosmopolitan and
sophisticated American tradition. Mr. Cummings has a crude and force–
ful directness which it would be hard to match in a contemporary Eng–
lish poet; Mr. Stevens a conscious refinement which it would be equally
hard to match. It is, however, an Alexandrian rather than an Attic re–
finement. Mr. Robert Graves is an English poet (an early and late ad–
mirer of Cummings) who shares Cummings's cult of what, in a large
and loose sense, can be called romantic love; but in his passionate pro–
priety and fastidiousness of diction he is quite unlike Mr. Cummings,
and yet equally, when one looks for counterbalancing resemblances, un–
like Mr. Stevens. Mr. Graves is an Atticizing writer, he wants words
and phrases to be apt, discreetly so, rather than showy; color and show–
iness are indispensable instruments for Mr. Stevens, his language is
opulent,
recherche,
queen of its own mode; every poem might have
stepped long-legged and starry-eyed, with tempting shadows on its
thighs, wearing this year's lightest and most expensive girdle, from a
poetry fashion magazine, an aesthetic equivalent of
Vogue.
There
are
American poets-Mr. Robert Frost is one-of whom it can be claimed
(as Bagehot claimed for Wordsworth, as against Tennyson and Brow–
ning) that they use language classically. Bagehot, who tagged the epithet
"grotesque" onto Browning and the epithet "ornate" onto Tennyson
