608
of wool caught in barbed wire, gorse
looming, without scent.
PARTISAN REVIEW
It is sensitive, accurate, vivid and, considering she confines herself fairly
strictly to the Imagists' language of things, intensely personal. But
though the matter is her own, the means are someone else's. There is
hardly a poem in
Overland to the Islands
which could not, with very
little trouble, be transplanted into the works of William Carlos Wil–
liams. Admittedly, that kind of romanticism of things demands a pe–
culiarly intimate fusion between the poet and whatever he is writing
about. Since Miss Levertov is willing to make this effort, it is a shame
that she will not take the next step into a language of her own. Per–
haps the San Francisco scene has something to do with her timidity,
for the extraordinary thing about the Beat Generation is the degree to
which they are old-fashioned. They seem to feel they have to
be
"modern," and "modern" simply means going through the ritual experi–
ments that were already dated by the mid-'twenties. It is, after all, time
someone explained to Mr. Ginsberg that Whitman and Vachel Lindsay
are not so very
avant-garde.
Similarly, with Miss Levertov: the older
generation did not experiment simply to seem advanced, they were also
trying to discover the precise form to fit their originality. When, there–
fore, she takes over ready-made a medium as experimentally individual
as Dr. Williams's, Miss Levertov is defeating the whole purpose of the
form. There is a sharpness to her perceptions that certainly sounds like
originality, but she has not quite found her own way of expressing it.
Other men's clothes and habits also get in the way of one's appre–
ciation of Mr. Charles Tomlinson's
Seeing Is Belit!1ving.
On the dust
jacket Professor Hugh Kenner comments: "In 1914 an American poet
was professionally illiterate if he wasn't reading contemporary French
poetry; today a British poet is equally provincial who doesn't incor–
porate into his art what has been achieved in the past thirty-five years
by Americans. Charles Tomlinson is the first Englishman to have thor–
oughly grasped the implications of this fact. Consequently he is the
most original poet to come along in a generation . . ."
If
there is a
hiatus in the professor's logic, it may perhaps be because he is not be–
ing wholly frank . It would be more accurate to say that Mr. Tomlinson
is the first English writer to be heavily influenced by Wallace Stevens.
Granted, Stevens is a hard master: a poet must have a good ear for
blank verse and considerable rhetorical control in order to follow him.
Even so, he runs risks:
Leaf-dapples sharpen. Emboldened by this
J.ri.t'IJ
