BOO KS
sea horses galloped to coral.
I fell in the tilt of the sea.
o
copy-book of ewes; I'd touched entelechy.
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The first four lines are very respectable. But Mr. O'Gonnan is
expecting too much of that word "entelechy." Not even the elves can
lend it the magic he asks of it. This isn't being metaphysical, but it is
sounding like a philosophy major. The trouble is that Mr. O'Gorman's
poetry is also
outside
poetry, and no real control is exercised over the
vagaries of his images from below. On the other hand, the promising
thing about his poems is that the images often exhibit an admirable
sense of the virtues of surface, and a vigor great enough to suggest that
they may at last hack and hew their way towards a significant internality.
There is a piety (which has been encouraged by some of Mr.
Eliot's remarks) that the only reputable critics of poetry are the active
practitioners of the art. For those subscribing to this rather exotic tenet,
Mr. Stanley Kunitz's
Selected Poems,
1928-1958, must seem the wind–
fall of the season. More than a half dozen of America's most respected
poets engage in a dust jacket contest to see who can show the most
deference to his poetic achievement. Mr. Richard Wilbur is probably
the winner: "One of the best poetry manuscripts of the century. No
exaggeration...." Borrowing his tenns of appraisal from some modern
critics of Ben Jonson's poetry, Mr. Henry Rago says that Mr. Kunitz's
language shows "an extraordinary combination of toughness and polish;
a classical strength."
It
is
easy to see why Mr. Rago, consciously or not,
has resorted to this vocabulary here. There is a verbal self-consciousness,
an educated archaic ingenuity with words, a trick of emphasis and
sinewy syllabics, in many of these poems obviously deriving from Jacob–
ean and Carolinian models. Here are two stanzas (the best two) from
"Beyond Reason":
I do not come intent to be your lord,
Nor to contract the empir-e of your flight,
But as the long eye holds the spinning bird
Enclosed in the circumference of sight
And yet the bird is infinitely free
To dip its beak into the thinnest air,
So do I stand. I am not 'destiny
To color time or plot a hemisphere.
The taut neatness of the conceit, its terse, emphatic development in
