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PARTISAN REVIEW
The jacket reads in part: "After graduating in 1952 from Amherst
College, where he won the Colin Armstrong Poetry Prize, he was em–
ployed as a research analyst with the National Security Agency in
Washington, D. C. In 1953 he was drafted into the army and served
in the Counter Intelligence Corps until his discharge in May, 1955.
While in the army, he applied for a Fulbright scholarship to study in
England and was awarded one to Worcester College, Oxford." No grass
grew under these winged feet, even "while in the army."
No doubt the favorable-if that is the word for it--economic situa–
tion of recent years has affected the tone and substance of the poetry
written by the young generation. So has the domesticity which is now
made easily possible,
if
it is not actually encouraged, by their job holding
status. A verse writing father and husband is less likely than a muse
ridden bachelor to arrive in the classroom with a hangover and his
papers uncorrected. But marriage
is
obviously an attractive as well as
advisable state for the young poets, and it provides them with a stock
of poetic subjects. Home, wife, children, parents, pets, gardens, summer
resorts, travel
en famille
make up the unromantic romance of this poetry
and equip the poet with a special kind of consciousness- what it is I
shall try to make clear later on. For lhis observation there is not only the
internal evidence of the poems but-again-the evidence supplied by
writers of biographical notes. Such writers seem to
be
in love with
family happiness these days and like to name the poet's wife, enumerate
his children, and offer other homely details. We learn of one poet that
"while there (in Cambridge, England), he was married, in 1954, to
- -, who travelled all the way from Missouri for the purpose." Mis–
souri
is
a far piece to travel from, for any purpose; and it is interesting
to discover that another poet bears a different name "in private life"
and that "three children and many more dogs share her interest, but
she admits she 'can't communicate with cats'."
N ew Poets of England and America
assists us in penetrating the
apparent anonymity, not to say nonentity, of the youthful band of men
and women who make verse under these circumstances. The volume
has been carefully edited, probably with some such purpose as this in
mind, by three of the young poets themselves: Donald Hall, Robert
Pack, and Louis Simpson. The editors include work by poets ranging
in age from about twenty-two to about forty. The presence of some
of Robert Lowell's impassioned poetry allows us to see how little im–
passioned-in any usual sense--the work of the younger writers is, and
so encourages us to look in it for other qualities. Representatives of
the West Coast School are not, so far as I can make out, included;
and
