BOO K S
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certain models in popular anthologies of contemporary verse.
2
Like
Wilbur she gives her reports on a trip to Europe, but the greatest dif–
ficulty the reader has in rereading her book is the overhearing of con–
temporary cliches reiterated, which is probably the fault of the
Zeitgeist,
or of a faulty use of it, with too many poets trying to write of the
same things at the same time. One too quickly discovers in her poem,
"The Tree," an alarming series of derivations-from one of Eliot's
minor poems, from Elinor Wylie's "Chimaera Sleeping," from Elizabeth
Bishop's "The Weed." The poem is too much like a classroom exercise;
good enough, but not her own. H er gift is for the semi-dramatic poem:
"The Bears," as a poem of childhood memories, could be described as
a companion piece to Wilbur's "Digging For China." She is at her best
in "Living in Sin" because she treats of a familiar situation-the
bohemian love affair-with a discerning, yet objective eye. Her next
book should find her more assured.
To be derivative is not a crime; no poet lives in a literary vacuum.
The question is: How derivative can you be and yet show the reader
you have something to say that is your own-your own language, your
own look at the world, your own music?
If
these remains are worth
publication, well and good.
An
example of divorce from the
Zeitgeist
is Elizabeth Jennings'
A Way of Looking,
a book of forty well-selected poems. (Miss Jennings,
by the way, has contributed to
The New Yorker,
but is untouched
by
its formula.) Miss J ennings is English-and the curse of contemporary
British verse is an imageless run of too many toneless words, in which, at
their worst, these poems share. At her best, Miss J ennings knows her own
mind; free of her instructors, her voice is heard in "Mirrors":
W as it a mirror then across a room,
A crowded room of parties where the smoke
Rose to the ceiling with the talk? The glass
Stared back at me a half-familiar fac e
Y et something hoped for. When at last you came
It was as if the distant mirror spoke.
2 In respect to popular anthologies certain important critical distinctions
should be made which exist beyond the
Zeitgeist.
These distinctions a re of taste
and scholarship. The standards of "magazine verse" in
The New Yorker
are sus–
tained and exchanged by "little treasury" collections of verse which are clipped
for the most part from current magazines: the impression gained from these
is a lack of taste and learning; and reading through them, one moves from
one group of "magazine verses" to the next. These collections have a commercial
and philistine air. True signs of taste and scholarship are present in the Warren–
Erskine
Six Centuries of Great Poetry
(Dell).
