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PARTISAN REVIEW
has managed to be almost phenomenally successful in pitching his own
range squarely in the middle of the tessitura in which so very many
poets of this generation continually aspire to sing. Poems today can do
many sorts of literary and speculative work. In some senses, the long, re–
flective poem may be thought of as the only modern equivalent of the
familiar or even the formal (non-critical) essay of the last century. Other
modes of writing approach the secular religious meditation, the sermon,
the familiar letter and other genres whose received prose forms today
usually constitute only degraded versions of what once they were. Mr.
Snodgrass's poems represent the increasingly sought-after effect of the
journal entry, of the autobiographical report, not assembled from deep
images in a kind of rhetorical patchwork, like so many of Dylan Thomas's
reminiscences, for example, but written out of considered reflections,
summoned up for judgment, whose preparatory motions would always
have seemed to consist rather of pencil nibbling than of vocalizing. In
such a form, wit is seldom an end in itself, but instead always serves
to keep the open scepticism of the narrator's scrutiny clear of the at–
tractions of abject sentimentality on the one hand, and of self-conscious
posturing on the other. Poems like "April Inventory," "A Cardinal," and
the title sequence, a group of poems for the poet's daughter (it takes
its title from a phrase in a translation of an Old Irish story: "an only
daughter is the needle of the heart"), all succeed in being openly auto–
biographical, intense and delicate at once, and never embarrassing.
Philip Larkin can write of himself this way; Robert Lowell's most re–
cent poems sometimes approach this (although they are much more, I
feel, than the mere autobiographical sketches they purport to be) , and
an occasional magnificent poem like Anthony Hecht's "The Vow" at–
tains the right temperament in its balance of tension and relaxation of
diction. But this sort of self-examination seems to be peculiarly Mr.
Snodgrass's forte. He can even redeem his tendency to fall into a half–
self-critical, genial-but-serious
E.
B. White kind of tone with the cor–
rective image, as in "April Inventory":
The trees hav'e more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I t,each,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.
Later on in this same poem, which will probably stand for some time
as the canonical utterance of the writer of unscholarly disposition
doomed, in the 1950's, to an academic life in which he will always feel
