POETRY CHRONICLE
161
outside;
in
no case except Miss Moore's do I know the proper
thing to say about these poets.
First of all, the level of accomplishment is very high; in any
comparable British batch there would be two or three volumes to
make you ask how the devil they ever got into print. It strikes me
that writing verse is something that only highly literate Americans
even attempt. Instead of feeling entirely pleased about this, I
complain that there are signs of over-literacy, of a sort of mandar–
inism, in the end of a repulsive frigidity in several of these poets.
There seems, to examine one straw in the wind, to be a tiny vogue
for the word "dolor," as if sorrow were essentially archaic. Or, to
take for scapegoat the ambitious, skilful and unmemorable book of
Katherine Hoskins, there is a habit of pursing the mouth for the
production of calm, distancing ironies, but what comes out is a new
and mincing poetic diction. "Some few, most temeraire, shove off/
and make for certain greeny islands ..." is an example; a better
one is the whole poem "Colloquy on a Departure," for this is about
a death, and takes such care to avoid declarations of unseemly
directness that it strangles itself. It seems symptomatic of uneasy
relations with the vulgar that Miss Hoskins can step beyond it into
solecism and non-usage: "Will she laden herself with these?" she
can write, and "But light so pierced, flickered, fretted's scarcely/
Radiant." Yet her performance occasionally equals in art and fas–
tidiousness her admired intentions; it seems strange that there
should be these lapses in the treatment of the
lingua franca et jo–
cundissima,
that the good brain should be troubled by an unspoken
conviction that poetry is essentially an archaizing activity.
Finding the same pursing of the mouth
in
the triple volume
Poets of Today VI,
I turned with interest
to
Mr. John Hall Whee–
lock's introductory essay, which is called "superlative" and "bril–
liant" on the jacket. It says that syntax is necessary to poetry, a
view which I mumblingly endorse, but its most revealing passages
deal with what Wordsworth called simply "wise passiveness," the
not frightening poems by rushing them, the deviousness of the
craft by which a primary intuition is given intelligible shape.
Again
one agrees; intuition without intelligence is an accident:
rougir
