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PARTISAN REVIEW
But it seems to me that comic verse, like "The Ingoldsby Legends" or
"The Bah Ballads," or Don Marquis, Ogden Nash, Phyllis McGinley,
or Dorothy Parker, is, like hymns or patriotic verse, verse with a "pal–
pable design on us." Its virtues are not the ordinary virtues of poetry.
A mere joke, like a mere surprise or a mere puzzle, loses its effect after
one has once laughed, been shocked, or guessed the answer. Auden
also puts in lots of poets, from Carl Sandburg to Edna St. Vincent
Millay, who, just because they answered so well some special need of
their own day, seem for the moment to answer no need of ours; they
look wrong, without yet looking touching, like women's dresses in films
of the 1930s. No doubt they should be in for the record, and in another
ten or twenty years we may be able to look at them straight. Elsewhere,
some of the choices from poets one is glad to see in are odd. No doubt,
for instance, John Peale Bishop was something of a composite poet;
his language is like a smooth but powerful cocktail, compounded of
those contemporary influences that seemed to him to have most kick
in them. Yet he did deserve to be represented, here, by something longer
and more ambitious than "The Dim and Ptolemaic Man." Why not
his rather terrifying "Ode"? Why, if Auden was printing Mr. Edmund
Wilson's sensitively chatty "On Editing Scott Fitzgerald's Papers," did
he not also print Bishop's full-mouthed and plangent elegy for Scott
Fitzgerald? And, among younger poets, why Robert Horan's vivid but
rather slight "Emblems of Evening" and not his sinisterly powerful
"Suppose We Kill a King"?
Any anthology, of course, lays itself open to such snipings; every
critic feels he could have done it better himself. But
The Criterion Book
of Modern American Verse
is worth possessing, particularly for the sake
of Auden's introduction. Auden is not, in any of the usual current
senses, a critic, except sometimes when, as in his poems on the deaths
of Yeats or Freud, he writes criticism in verse. One wouldn't go to
him for a critical placing of a poet; in his very inept piece on Tennyson,
for instance, where he accuses Tennyson of being stupid, he does not
see that Tennyson's importance, like his own, lies in absorbing, using,
and poetically responding to the centrally important ideas of his age.
Moreover, Tennyson was more of an anticipator than Auden: "In
Memoriam" preceded
The Origin of Species
by over a dozen years.
Again, one wouldn't go to Auden for particularized appreciation or an
examination of how a poem works. But what he is good at is a generaliz–
ing suggestiveness, a setting of poets against the "climate of ideas" of
their place and time. He generalizes very helpfully in his introduction
about what it is, for English readers, that makes American poetry
different.
