300
PARTISAN REVIEW
manner once, and I turned with slightly more than nostalgic interest
to his
New and Selected Poems
to see what had happened to it. Not
very much has; Mr. Fearing has continued to produce his fragments
of WPA Theatre shooting-script, his jazzy observations for easy read–
ing, his Character pieces in the manner of a hep Carl Sandburg, with
an unflagging devotion to
GETTING THE POINT ACROSS.
The earliest of
the poems in this book may well have been written when I was very
young; certainly many of them were written during the heyday of
Norman Corwin's radio successes, and right now they strike me as
very much the same sort of thing. They are not as vulgar, however,
and if I find their hopeful candor a little inadequate, it is only in
the sense that I now find that my own view of the world, dating from
high-school days and my unspoiled appreciation of poems like "Dirge,"
simply will not do any more. The only saddening thing is to realize
that Mr. Fearing's style, use of format, and hardened but warm-hearted
old City Editor tone have all been most effectively adopted, and put
to every conceivable kind of purpose, by those very manipulators of
mass-communications that are pilloried in his fifteen-page introduction
on "Reading, Writing and the Rackets."
Kathleen Raine's
Collected Poems
pose a different kind of problem
for the reviewer, especially for one who, like myself, has never been
more than a casual reader of her work. Miss Raine's reputation in her
native country is, I understand, quite high; she is particularly praised
for an almost mystical generality of subject and purity of language
that I find myself wanting to call more ascetic than properly chaste. In
her, introduction, she informs us that she has excluded from her col–
lection of her work of nearly fifteen years all poems specifically religious,
those concerned with love, "and a third order that also belongs to
the transient and not the imaginative order, poems descriptive of events
in time and place as such . . . that now seem as dead as any other
journalism." Remaining are over a hundred and twenty incantations
on timeless and universal themes, but by far the bulk of them slipped
through my transient grasp. They are all full of traditional arcana-the
four elements, Druidical trees, religious mysteries-but they never seem
to be anchored to much of Miss Raine's own experience. Their general
effect is somewhat like that of all the incomplete sentences in the
literary remains of the pre-Socratics. Perhaps I should have had very
different things to say of a volume composed of the poems excluded
from this collection. A few pieces like "Optical Illusion" and "The
Speech of Birds" gave glimpses of an intelligence that had more to
expound than it thought was serious, or proper, or general enough;
