162
FRANK KERMODE
d'
~tre
la Pythie!
Still, nurture is of little use without nature, and
it is also possible to be literate and human at the same time. Mr.
Gene Baro, the first of these three poets, seems to write most hap–
pily when he is being frankly very literary, as in "What Each Thing
Gives," a sort of amalgam of Yeats and Stevens, and least happily
when, in Mr. Wheelock's figure, he is stalking his own shy poem.
Taking a chance on his poems being in roughly chronological order,
I'd say that Mr. Baro has developed remarkably; but his passion
and his skill remain in a kind of ice palace, essentially literate, es–
sentially archaic, unwillingly cold. Mr. Donald Finkel, the second
of the three, is a wit-writer, praised by his editor for a victory over
dissociated sensibility, and called "a poet of the aesthetics of
poetry" like Valery and Stevens. The second of these remarks
makes sense, and Mr. Finkel is at his best in that kind, for example
in "Archaic Figurine from Nayarit," "The Clothing's New Emper–
or," and especially "Poem As Seen from a Balcony." What does
Juliet on the balcony see when she looks up the perspective of the
street?
The figures in the ,distance most approach
True height when they most reach
Infinity. And so, when all
The facts are come to light, they are too small
To make a difference. Where the walls converge
The slope of her perception
Is hardly worth consideration
When, at last, substantial Montagues emerge.
Good. "In Gratitude," on the other hand, is not about poetry but
about "small but adequate deaths" that try a man:
Shall I let him know of my grief
Regarding the houseflies, seeing
What hurts me was not their death
But merely their dying?
And, nicely observed as it is, this poem shows how the poet's touch
'grows uncertain when there are questions of life and death. His
casual circumlocutions ("I am loath to remember," "all things
considered," "regarding the houseflies" are the necessary febrifuges,
