BOOKS
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surgery or CUlsme, how can one call the brain the brain the way
one calls a goat a goat? And in the poems written after 1930, when
Mr. Winters forsook free verse for rhyme and stanza, one comes on
the same sort of flatness and inexactitude of language, as well as
occasional relapses into the phraseology of other poets. In these
later poems (which are full of paradox, ambiguity, and strict
wit)
the relation between Mr. Winters' style and his subject matter
becomes clearer: his search for the hard and pure in language is
accompanied by a search for the hard and pure in life:
The young are quick of speech.
Grown middle-aged, I teach
Corrosion and distrust,
Exacting what I must
...
I like the crankiness of this poem; and many of Mr. Winters' poems
do have, like some of our Park Avenue skyscrapers, an admirable
hardness and coolness. But I am constantly put off by his language.
His poems are made up of live language mixed with dead and
literary language (such as "quick of speech," a very different con–
struction from the earlier "solid in the spring") as if their author
were unable to tell one from another. In his reaction against what
he regarded as the softness and rottenness of modern language and
modern life, this poet seems to have felt that anything great and
pure, even though dead, could serve as a poetic corrective. But to
write poetry at all one either has to use words that are alive or else
one has to be able to breathe life into them at least for the length
of a phrase. This Mr. Winters too often fails to do. Perhaps self–
imposed limitation and constriction is the wrong way to achieve
stylistic purity; it is possible that such limitation might cut one off
from just those live words that one needed to make one's pure poem
an effective one.
Lawrence Durrell's poems have other virtues and other flaws
than those of Mr. Winters. Far from being too tight and constricted,
Mr. Durrell's poems about love, history, Greek islands, and Egyp–
tian cities, tend to be loose-sometimes to the point of flaccidity.
His poetry does, however, communicate a sensuous pleasure
in words that one never gets from reading Mr. Winters.
If
Mr.
Winters is interested in purity of outline, Mr. Durrell is interested
in
elaboration of surface: "The islands rebuffed by water. /Estuaries
