610
PA RTISAN REVIEW
Best Poems of
1955, conSlStmg of one poem per poet a page or
two long, is as good a choice, I think, as could be expected from this
peculiar method of selection. There are good poems here by Frost,
Warren, Horan, Roethke, Heath-Stubbs and others, but it is Wilbur's
"A Baroque Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" that crowns the whole. I t's
a wonderful poem; the times have made it so. However we may object
to its aesthetic piety (by the standards, at least, of St. Francis, who
appears toward the end to balance the moral equation) :
I f that is what men are,
Or should be, if those water-saints display
'The pattern of our
arete
W hat of these showered fauns in their bizarre
Spangled, and plunging house?
Th ey are at rest in fullness
or!
desire
For what is given, they do not tire
Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse,
And riddled pool below,
R eproving our disgust and our ennui
With humble insatiety.
.. .
or however we may grumble at one or two inert phrases or the edifying
overtness of the whole (all possible objections, I think), we are aston–
ished at the aptness of Wilbur's choice of language, rhythm and meter,
at the fullness and energy of it all. The poem itself is at rest in the full–
ness of desire (the desire to admonish as well as delight) , solidly in the
reigning climate but perfectly expressing the climate at its most out–
going. Wilbur is by no means always this good.
James Wright and Edgar Bowers both offer first books and rather
neatly divide the popular (or perhaps populist) and highbrow traditions
between them. Which is to make a distinction that tends to evaporate
as attention moves from subject and temperament toward the poetic
means chosen. Wright appears-no disparagement intended-as a little
father of the provinces, in a fugitive, tragic world inherited from
Robinson, Frost, Wordsworth, Burns and Clare. He rates high marks
for
human~ty,
sobriety, emotional delicacy and technical conscience. But
he is not yet fully visible in his work. We miss Frost's speaking voice.
Sometimes he verges on a sentimentality of contrast, treating his rural
crises with a shade too much charm and synesthetic mildness.
If
there
is less than ever of a recognizable "country" these days, so much the
