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does not seem to come easily to these younger poets. By sense of role
I mean the kind of postures assumed by Whitman when he is being
the cosmic reporter to whom all things are copy, or by Emily Dickinson
when she queens it in her suffering universe, or by Ezra Pound when he
is the Promethean exhorter, or by Frost and Stevens when they take
up opposite but complementary positions toward the world's work, be–
coming respectively the visionary farmer and the Sunday poet with a
Monday morning conscience. This dramatic conception of self vis-a.-vis
the reader and the world is, I suggest, largely alien to the younger
poets, and the absence of it is probably more damaging to their work
than the mere blackout of modernist fireworks . It is here, possibly, that
the security provided by their common style and material well-being
plays them false. They appear content to be just poets together, in–
different to the histrionic claims that poetry makes on a culture when
poetry is a major art.
In that restrictive consciousness of theirs, however, there is some–
thing like an emergent sense of role. It is apt
to
express itself in a
confessional form which has its antecedents in Eliot and Auden. But
the confessor is now increasingly finite and personal. Saying I, he
usually means his literal self in all its literal daily reality. "'Mirror,
mirror on the wall, Who is Donald Andrew Hall?" inquires Donald
Hall ; and in another poem (both of them in
N ew Poems)
he locates
himself still more exactly: "I sit upon a changing porch and think /
ideas about the insubstantial wood, that I may make real porches out
of ink." Hall has other subjects and some expert verse, but a certain
blunt assertion of self, as of a real poet in a real garden, place and
hour and weather specified, state of mind clarified and moral drawn,
does tend to characterize his performance. He has a more free spirited
counterpart in W. D . Snodgrass who also makes poetry out of a very
tangible personal relation to children, job, landscape and even to his
surname ("Snodgrass is walking through the universe."). Pressure of
circumstance makes this poet's consciousness half assertive and half
uneasy. Out of the compound comes something freshly comic, for this
American poet seems to have affinities with the comparable English
school of Kingsley Amis, in his poems and novels, and Philip Larkin.
In "Heart's Needle," a long poem about himself and a child of his, he
has a clean graphic style ; and in "April Inventory" his job is treated
to a memorable burst of derision when he writes: "The sleek expensive
girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of
reach," and then goes on to sum up his recent successes and failures
in love, friendship and scholarship. In one way or another, "my slovenly
life, my dog-dead youth," as Howard Nemerov puts it in "The Va-
