138
PARTISAN REVIEW
Now? That happy shape
my foreh ead had under my most long, rare,
rauendark, hidden, soft bodiless hair
you award me still.
You must not love me, but I do not bid you cease.
Mr. Berryman's earlier poems struck me as, on the whole, clever and
polished but thin.
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
has strength and body
to it; one waits eagerly to see what he will do next.
Peter Viereck strikes me as a smooth, empty poet, ridden, perhaps,
in his verse as in his prose by the notion of a modish neo-conservatism:
a lot of quite good poetic manners around no felt center, somebody
trying to be Lord Chesterfield in Iowa. The poems in
Poets of Today
are the kind of thing that young men bring to me in London, out–
pourings with patches of talent here and there. Spencer Brown, for
instance, aims at symphonic form in poetry and achieves self-indulgent
wordiness. The introduction, which discusses the three young poets in–
cluded in the volume as if they were Pound or Eliot, and doesn't even
hint that they have still almost everything to learn about art, let alone
"life," must be very bad and head-turning for them. Yet here and
there, and particularly in some of Spencer Brown's shorter poems, there
is promise.
Finally, I do not know what Roy Campbell's
Talking Bronco,
pub-
1
lished in England ten years ago, is doing in this list; except that, as
a British Dominions poet, he shares with American poets a carefree,
adventurous attitude to language. The title poem is a piece of rough
but vigorous Charles Churchillian satire on a composite English poet
of the 1930s called MacSpaunday. A lot of the other poems come out
of Campbell's gallant service in the Second World War ; he was rightly
proud of his rank as a sergeant, and even the birds tend to have chev–
rons. Campbell at his best is,
in
a way that recalls Victor Hugo and
the great French Romantics rather than any English model, a splendid
poet; he can use the most bold and obvious rhetorical directness as he
'
can use 'the coarsest colloquialisms, without ceasing to be a poet. There
is no single poem in
Talking Bronco
as good as Campbell's earlier
"Tristan da Cunha" or "Wild Horses on the Camargue," but even at
his patchiest and cockiest he still makes a lot of his contemporaries look
like. wet hens. I hope that the book will not be treated snootily in the
Umted States-as ten years ago some critics tended to treat it in
England-because, as a Catholic traditionalist, Campbell fought along-
