1.08
PARTISAN REVIEW
POETRY CHRONICLE
BEST POEMS OF 1955. Borestone Moun+oin Poetry Awords. Stonford
University Press. $3.50.
THE GREEN WALL. By Jomes Wright. Foreword by W. H. Auden. Yole
University Press. $2.50.
THE FORM OF LOSS. By Edgor Bowers. Alon Swollow. $2.00.
A SWIMMER IN THE AIR. By Howord Moss. Scribner's. $3 .00.
SELECTED POEMS. By Lowrence Durrel l. Grove. $1.25.
WOMEN OF TRACHIS. By Ezro Pound. New Directions. $3.00.
The situation in poetry, on this quarter's evidence, seems
much like that in painting. These poets can be negatively defined, as
Valery defined the Symbolists, as not expecting large audiences, as not
dealing directly with public ideas or emotions (such as
they
are, these
days) and-a descent in this from the Symbolists-as not discovering
anything much new in the medium itself. Painters are more fractionally
gregarious than poets and keep alive at least the semblance of con–
troversy; but the state of both arts is really the same. The defining limits
of abstraction and eccentricity have long ago, for this era at any rate,
been reached. What remains, though nobody likes to say so out loud,
is an eclectic display of talent, wit, and synthesizing imagination. Intel–
ligence can advance even though language and rhetoric stand still. I
enjoyed all these poets and feel wiser for having read them, yet I
can't describe them with the hieratic fervor that Messrs. Blackmur and
Tate, among several, once brought to their omnibus reviews.
Affability, on the whole, is the order of the day. Moss is good na–
ture personified, though he can be tellingly mordant. Edgar Bowers is
an extraordinary eruption of the neo-classic
stille Grosse
and
edle Ein–
falt.
Pound's bonhomie, in passages of the
Trachiniae,
reaches almost
to the gruesome. James Wright's collection of waifs and strays move in
a mercifully enveloping nature, their cries muffled in shifting meta–
phorical vistas.
In
making up a
Selected Poems,
Lawrence Durrell left
out the longer, combatively Audenesque poems, like "Eternal Contem–
poraries" and "The Anecdotes," from his earlier books and kept some
dullish shorter poems that conform better to the Ovidian
persona
he is
trying to achieve. What we see is a counter-revolution by diffidence
rather than by repression. Both the radical and conservative impulses
are thwarted by lack of opposition. Graves, Winters, Rexroth, Williams
and Fitts continue to fill the upper air with grape shot. One would
like to get hit by some of it, but it always seems just out of reach..
