458
PARTISAN REVIEW
The virtues of this poem are, generally speaking, the virtues of
all Miss Rich's work and of the best work of her generation. The lang–
uage is neither systematically colloquial, as Frost's language tends to
be, nor alternately colloquial and conceptual, as Eliot's was in his early
poems; nor does it burst into a fine spray of fantastication as Stevens's
was apt to do. Miss Rich seems to have access to some common style, a
language which she and her contemporaries all tend to speak easily,
with a minimum of individual inflection.
It
permits them to retain
the "conversational tone," that all but universal idiom of modernist
poetry, and yet to sound it without the apparent exercise of any strict
selective principle. So too with the structure of the verse, which dis–
tinctly scans but is free enough to allow the musical phrase, as dis–
tinguished from the metrical foot, a good deal of autonomy. But the
way of this common style with metaphor is probably its most definitive
trait. The proud, self-sufficient "image" of modernist poetry, subduing
all local or random figuration to its central purpose, and offering to
the reader the allurement of a dark glass turned on an enigmatic
universe, is largely gone from this poetry. With it is gone the modernist
assertion of the supremacy of imagination and the artist. To claim
access to an
anima mundi
or to the omniscience of a Tiresias, in the
manner of a Yeats or an Eliot, would occur to none of these poets, if
I know them; there is not even anything resembling Wallace Stevens's
businesslike evaluation of imaginative experience, his sense of it as a
good investment or a proper form of insurance. Figures of speech are
now apt to be announced by a candid "like" or "as;" the homely simile
is back ; experience is fancified rather than transformed; readers are
cordially invited to share in the proce5ses.
The muse as desirable guest is eminently and happily Miss Rich's
muse. A woman in a non-feminist age, an artist in a time that is not
conspicuously creative, she makes poetry out of a sense of limitations,
is equa:ble without the accusing calm of the self-accepting, wise without
being a young owl. Her "Living In Sin" describes a studio love affair
from the viewpoint of a mildly domestic minded girl.
It
is in twenty–
seven lines of limpid unrhymed verse and is an admirable work of this
poet and this time.
Some of the men poets are more ambitious than Miss Rich, but
they are not often better. On many of them, too, acute feelings of
limitation are patently at work; and the domestic status, in those who
have it, is apt to induce the peculiar form of consciousness on which I
remarked above. The poems that express it, in their several ways, are
among the most original in the various volumes. This consciousness
helps to do duty for the sense of role which good poets have and which
