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PART I SAN REVIEW
cuum," gets a good deal of play among the younger poets; and Reed
Whittemore, in one of his poems, declares the verse of it to be "Neither
major nor minor but merely (an old kind) doodle," while "Doodle
is waiting raised to a fine art."
The role is a slight one, and the present tyranny of "light verse"
contributes to its attenuation.
It
has the painful effect of stifling any
emotion beyond what can be experienced while one is being watched
by a wife or a child or a class of students or-as it sometimes appears–
by the poem one is writing.
It
produces an intensity of observation, a
paucity of vision, and seems to render impossible any connection between
poetry and the realm of general ideas.
An historical as opposed to a personal account of the role is given
by Louis Simpson, a poet of greater scope than most and of formidable
technical skill. I am quoting "The Silent Generation" in
New Poems.
It was his contemporaries, Simpson says, who "put the Devil down
[meaning Hitler] with great enthusiasm-
But now our occupation
Is gone, our education
Is wasted on the town.
We lack enthusiasm.
Life seems a mystery;
It's like the playa lady
Told me about: «It's not ..
It doesn't have a plot,"
She said, «It's history."
It
probably is just history that has caused and is causing the
im–
poverishment of the creative spirit, and not only in poetry and in
Simpson's generation. Still, single poems may be superior to the general
state of poetry, and individual talents may hold promise of development.
In the volumes at hand there are superior poems by William Jay Smith,
Richard Wilbur, William Meredith, Philip Booth, John Hollander,
Anthony Hecht and others. In Hollander and Hecht, the pleasure in
wit and musical structure seems to replace any acute preoccupation with
self and history. And then there is W. S. Merwin, a poet who appears
to have arrived on the contemporary scene out of another world. It is
not yet a clearly defined location, and the atmosphere of it can be
windy as well as airy. But Love is there a passion instead of a slogan,
and verse shows a strange elemental confidence in itself, transcending
jobs, awards, fellowships, history and the other conditions of its making.
F. W. Dupee
