BOOKS
547
postlude I like her best because she is alive: Active Voice.
So
many
other published voices are not: they are conscientiously feeling Rilke,
feeling Rimbaud, feeling Melville, feeling Yeats, feeling Feeling, or
feeling temporarily not much of anything at all. Even Mr. Todd, who
has shown elsewhere that his veins run with blood and not with some
cola derivate-even he manages to be dull here, not least when he is
insisting, in catarrh-clogged numbers, upon the value of excess. "The
tepid truth inflict[s] a wound," he reports; but he is wrong. This time
his whole book seems wrong, and I find it alarming that he can imagine,
let alone print, such verses as these from an inappropriately soporific
Epithalamium:
May the voyage on which you verge
Be kind and pleasing to you both;
May your happinesses merge
East and West and North and-
yes: South. "Voyage: verge," for the love of Cythereia!
A Mantelpiece
of Shells
may be a momentary aberration; but Mr. Olson's
The Scare–
crow Christ
seems to mean itself, which is a depressing thought. Not long
ago the author wrote a discerning book
a:bout
the poetry of Dylan
Thomas, yet to judge from these verses you would think that he had
never heard of technic, of anything that the ear can control. His lines
are ugly, not with the ugliness of art, but with the surd ugliness of un–
tested speech. Meanwhile his symbols hunch by you like trucks on a wet
night. Mr. Humphries can be fairly overt with his symbols, too: witness
"The Good Swimmer," for instance; but he manages them with an ar–
rogant expertness, while Mr. Olson merely lumbers. Mr. Nemerov can
handle them too, as he demonstrates in a wholly successful poem called
"Sunday at the End of Summer," where a quiet construction of detail
builds up to an admirable release; but he is not often so lucky, and the
greater part of his book is an exercise in silent writing. Even Mr. Belitt,
whose first book promised so much, seems merely civil, too civil, and
certainly more solemn than serious. And Miss Carrier, who
is
obviously
gifted, who seems to know what she is about even when she defaces her
lines with such jukebox barbarisms as "tho"-is it not symptomatic of
this group that she, too, should so often recede with a sigh just at the
brink of success?
It
is almost perverse to write a poem as good as "Death
in the Afternoon" or "Peter at Fourteen" and then lapse into an attitude.
Attitudes? These are like Mr. Todd's "tepid truth"; but if only they
made something more than sense! Rhetorical attitudes, like Mr. Auden's
or Miss Sitwell's or Miss Gardner's; conscious attitudes; dramatic
atti-
