BOOKS
609
The minds of artificers would turn prismatic,
Running on lace perforated in crisp wafers
That could cut like steel. Constitutions,
Drafted under this fecund chill, would be annulled
For the strictness of their equity, the moderation of their pity.
The question is, quite simply, whether or not all those polysyllabics are
really necessary. Are they demanded by the subject or by the Stevens
manner? Stevens could manage this kind of rhetoric because running
under it all was an insistent, needling worry about the ways of the
imagination. Mr. Tomlinson, on the other hand, seems concerned merely
with the technical difficulties of translating his landscapes into abstrac–
tions. He intellectualizes around them with a certain aplomb, and oc–
casionally, when he allows the scenes to emerge by themselves, he pro–
duces some admirably unruffled decorative verse-see "Farewell to Van
Gogh." But there is something static about most of it. The poems seem
to end in the air, rather frayed, as though he continually left out that
last stanza which gathers all the threads together. The polysyllabics, in
short, suggest nice intellectual discriminations, but the quickening dis–
turbance which would make them valid and transform the rhetoric into
poetry is just not there.
Mr. Tomlinson might learn something from Howard Nemerov's
Mirrors and Windows.
Mr. Nemerov is a relatively low-pressure poet,
who is good precisely to the degree to which he avoids large claims:
Salmon can manage, and the comedian crow
can do his turn, even the cat can rise,
a natural, into grace; but as for us,
not fish, not flesh, not fowl, our ecstasies
are never groundless
...
His witty, unemphatic intelligence is, in itself, a relief. More important,
however, it seems always to be based on a kind of sense of human fact;
he writes poetry for reasons more personal and immediate than the
mere desire to poeticize.
Alfred Alvarez
