550
PARTISAN REVIEW
The loving ended as all self-loue ends
And teaches us that only fair-grounds have
The right to show us halls of mirrors where
In every place we look we see our stare
Taunting our own identities. But loue
Perceives without a mirror in his hand.
I think Miss Jennings has written a directly inspired poem that
deserves respect and admiration from her contemporaries; she has set
herself distinctly apart from other poets, and may, if all goes well, make
her own world, the enduring "something new" that critics always hope
to find, the place beyond the
Zeitgeist.
John Ashbery's book,
Some Trees,
like other recent volumes in the
Yale Series of Younger Poets, is published with the blessings of W. H.
Auden. Auden's introductions almost always steal the show; I never
resist the temptation to read a new one. Auden has style and conversa–
tional wit which the age has paid tribute to-and which no one would
deny. His quick mind lacks the trappings of respectability; it shifts and
takes whatever it desires, and critical irresponsibility seizes him by the
hair whenever his conversation drifts to the subject of American verse.
He is certainly generous, but when he speaks of Mr. Ashbery's promise
as one that places him in the tradition of Rimbaud, his generosity over–
burdens the young poet who receives it-where does Ashbery go from
there? Ashbery's lines are in good prose; they are by no means dull,
and the most amusing of them-in which a scene between a naked
"novice" and an angel is described-were probably written to shock
clubwomen in the suburbs. Ashbery should be naughtier than that–
and then turn to Rimbaud, if he wishes, for his master.
In Wilfred Watson's
Friday's Child,
the American suburbs abruptly
disappear. Of the younger poets he is the most happily free from (I
almost wrote "classroom") conventions of the recent
Zeitgeist.
His dis–
tance from them may be geographical, for he lives in Canada, but this I
doubt. His distance is better defined by the poems in his book. His
chosen masters are Yeats and Dylan Thomas, and his debts to them
are acknowledged by name within the poems. He has also read the
Elizabethans:
o
love, teach us to love you, that we may
Through burning Carthage take our way.
Since he has paid his debts to Thomas in two poems, the first
"An
Admiration" and the second "A Contempt"-the latter of greater passion
