BOOKS
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the books on display, we must admit its absurdity and get on with it
nevertheless.
In any such process two of these works can-indeed, should-be
recognized, saluted, and dropped from discussion. Miss Sitwell's
Col–
lected Poems
and the
Collected Poems,
1955 of Mr. Robert Graves de–
mand the leisurely consideration that is the due of established poets at
the height of their power. They also demand such a critic as Mr. Black–
mur or-let me say simply Mr. Blackmur. I would rather have them
read generally than any of the other poets, bar one, that are under
discussion here; but they are cases apart. I shall only reaffirm my admir–
ation for the virtuosity of Miss Sitwell's earlier poems, and my convic–
tion that in her work since 1940 she has achieved one of the difficult
lovely summits in contemporary art. She can be diffuse, ornate, vain,
portentous, all to the heroic degree; she is never negligible, and never
mean. Similarly Mr. Graves, who is as fine a poet though certainly a
less spectacular one, can confuse us (as Yeats often does) with his
mystico-mythological preoccupations and worry us sometimes with an
inconsequential kind of male stridor; yet his poems stand up in the
light like hills, and even at his weakest there is a force in him that is
generous and pure. Neither poet, I think, has the stature of Mr. Auden;
but
The Shield of Achilles
is a transient work, mostly Auden
in absentia,
and should not be compared with what amounts to an
Opera Omnia.
One is tempted to treat Mr. Humphries in the same cavalier way,
for his
Poems: Collected and New
is largely a recollection, an
Opera
Quasi Omnia,
to which the latest poems add little. He is not, of course,
of the first rank; neither is he an experimental or a tendentious poet;
but one must look far, and read too much, before encountering a more
agreeable lyrist. Possibly because he is a Latinist (but so is Miss Carrier)
-at any rate, there is something solid and passionately clear from which
he derives his tactile language, a heard language, utterly unlike the
prettily stanza'd eye-language that one finds in so many of these books.
He can write what most of his younger contemporaries could not even
if
the idea should occur to them: sustained, intricate music. And his
music is generally worth listening to. It is a pity that in this collection
he chooses to keep so much that is ephemeral, so much that is merely
playful-padding, when there was no need for padding. And it must
be confessed that his bluff wit, like that of Mr. Graves, is sometimes
hard to endure. But with all these reservations noted, let us see.
Not
sick, nor bent on self-destruction either-I
deliberately take one of
his
early poems because when I first met
it,
years ago, it seemed exact,
inevitable; and it has stuck in my mind ever since:
