POEJ.RY CHRONICLE
LIGHT AND DARK. By Berber!! Howes. Wesleyan University Press. $3 ;
pe perbeck, $1 .65.
SAINT JUDAS. By James Wright. Wesleyan University Press. $3; paper·
bock. $1.65.
A STRANGER'S PRIVILEGE. By Robert Pack. Macmillan Company. $3.50.
APPLES FROM SHINAR. By Hymen Plutzik. Wesleyan University Press.
$3; paperbo ck, $1 .65.
The four poets reviewed here are by no means as unlike
as they appear to be on the surface of their poems. In curious ways
they are as American as any contemporary poets I have read. They are
not necessarily American in their landscapes or in their speech idioms.
At least two of them are saturated in European culture, and none of
them are American in the disqualifying sense that often makes one look
at the ceiling. Their Americanness is in their moral quality, and in their
intellectual and spiritual affinities with some deep strains of experience
coming down from the American past. By which I do not mean that
they are not of their time, for they are: but quite as certainly, they
be–
long to an American tradition that flows directly to us from the nine–
teenth century, however they may modify it themselves. This is to say
at once that all five have given us valuable volumes.
Barbara Howes'
Light and Dark
is in continuity with our intellec–
tual tradition through an important and related, but different current
than that of the others. Since the War and our extensive fellowship
program for Americans abroad (and perhaps also since many other
things) the American's quest in the Old World has seemed a little tar–
nished, and not at all what it was once. We ourselves might admit
this
is because we are now so powerful abroad, and concede that power
corrupts. Mr. Louis Simpson in a recent book,
A Dream of Governors,
concludes a poem with these suggestive lines about an American in
Italy:
But I am an American, and bargain
In the Thieves' Market, where the junk of cultur6
Lies in the dust-clay shards, perhaps Etruscan,
And wedding rings.
...
The fine thing about Barbara Howes's poems is that her attitude
goes back to a better pattern of culture in which the American sought
knowledge and enlightenment
in
Europe, not the acquisition of "things"
