POETRY CHRONICLE
There was a book
By
a William Tarantula once.
My name is William
Too.
165
American poets (to venture another of those generalizations)
go on and get better as they age. Winfield Townley Scott's
Scrim–
shaw
has a time-bitten quality;
it
knows a lot about everything,
including poetry and men; he writes splendidly about William
Carlos Williams and Phelps Putnam, and he speaks out, the voice
and the hands are of the same man. He has a genuine modem
clarity, as in "The Hour Is Late," and he can do a lot of different
things
without looking affected. Without being a very big poet he
is a good one; and although he's read all the poets the younger men
can't forget, he is decidedly there, always, in his own right. He
gives pleasure.
The power to do that is Marianne Moore's long-established
claim
on our duty. 0
To Be A Dragon
is a
thin
book, twenty-two
pages of verse and five of notes; four of these pages are devoted
to the Brooklyn Dodgers, and that is tough on me, but they obvi–
ously come from the incredibly distinguished hand that fashioned
"In the Public Garden." This work, which is of an originality, a
technical bravura, a confidence (that we are all willing to study
the physics of the Moore world and like it) sufficient to silence all
but the most ambitious young, ends by describing itself as "With–
out that radiance which poets/are supposed to have-unofficial, un–
professional," and goes on:
still one need not fail
to wish poetry well
where intellect
is
habitual-
glad that the Muses have a home and swans–
that legend can be factual;
happy that Art, admired in general,
is always actually personal.
Of course this book is radiant, professional, personal, and full of
intellect. It seems hard that one person can
be
a poet by brooding
