BO OK S
MODERN POETRY: THE AMERICAN ACC ENT
THE CRITERION BOOK OF MODERN AMERICAN VERSE. Edited with
an introduction by W. H. Auden. Criterion. $5.00.
LIKE A BULWARK. By Marianne Moore. Viking. $2.50.
HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET. By John Berryman. Farrar, Straus
&
Cudahy. $3.75.
THE PERSI('AMON TREE. By Peter Viereck. Scribner's. $3.00.
POETS OF TODAY, Ill: THE FLOATING WORLD AND OTHER POEMS.
By Lee Anderson. MY FATHER'S BUSINESS AND OTHER POEMS. By
Spencer Brown. THE GREEN TOWN: POEMS. By Joseph Langland.
Scribner's. $3.95.
TALKING BRONCO. By Roy Campbell. Regnery. $2.50.
Auden's anthology, for an English reader like myself who
already knows and likes American poetry, is pleasant reminders rather
than new discoveries. It perhaps begins too early: Edwin Arlington
Robinson is a very fine poet, large, ruminative, salty, but he belongs
in my mind in a leisurely lost world, somewhere between Browning and
Hardy, rather than with "the modern movement." His very amplitude,
and his patient interest in the quirks of individual character, presuppose
a security we lost long ago; a world where people had time to read
long poems, and discuss the ideas in them, and to turn from that to
talk about their neighbors. Again, I think Auden puts in much too much
comic verse, though certainly the Americans are good at it. Light verse
can be poetry :
Venus, take my votive glass,
For I am not what I was,
What from this day I shall be,
Venus, let me never see!
Nonsensical or fantastical verse can be poetry:
Tee-heel Tee-heel
0
sweet delight!
He tickles this age that can
Call Tullia's ape a marmosite
And Leda's goose a swan.
