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ROBERT M. ADAMS
thoroughly commonplace cntlclsm. And the last thing to be said
about Mr. Baines's biography is that if one subtracts from it all the
things which have been said before, so often that they are common
knowledge, and
all
the things which shouldn't have been said at all,
one would be left with a contribution indeed, and a real one--but
one much closer to fifty than to five hundred pages long.
It
was a curious fate which allowed Conrad to be largely neg–
lected while he was doing first-rate work, then raised him to popu–
larity on the basis of inferior work, and has now produced veritable
armies of critics intent on probing, expounding, reacting against one
another, evaluating, cross-evaluating, and groping after the higher
synthesis. Perhaps it is only perverse to hope that this intense effort
to domesticate Conrad won't succeed too well. There was a rooted
wildness about this intensely cosmopolitan man, to which his best
friends bore slightly baffled witness; if he looks a little exotic in the
graduate school and the camp of the Levite, there's nothing to say
but
"Vive La difference!"
Robert M. Adams
POETRY CHRONICLES
SECOND AVENUE. By Fronk O'Horo. Totem Press.
$
.95.
COLLECTED POEMS. By Yvor Winters. Alon Swollow. $1.65.
COLLECTED POEMS. By Lowrence Durrell. Dutton. $5.00.
SONGS. By Christopher Logue. Ivon Obolensky. $3.00.
LUPERCAL. By Ted Hughes. Horper. $3.00.
Frank O'Hara's
Second Avenue
is a poem in eleven
parts-about the length of
The Witch of Atlas.
Its chief persona is
a sort of Whitmanian I, though other voices appear and disappear
as they do for example in the
Cantos
and
Paterson.
The I is warmer
well he didn't even have to look at it any more; its details are so
naturally associated with his strongest feelings that they are con–
stantly turning into symbols and back into surface again:
Shall I ever be able to avail myself of the service called
"Same Day Cleaning", and in what face have I fought the Host?
Most writers about New York exaggerate or sentimentalize; the
