BOO KS
137
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WELDON KEES. Edited
by
Don.ld
Justice. The Stone Woll Press. $18.
THE WOMAN AT THE WASHINGTON ZOO. By Rondoll Jorrell.
Atheneum Publishers. $3 .75.
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. By Howord N.merov. Th. Uni–
versity of Chicogo Press. $3 .50.
In some periods there are poets who function in certain
respects more as critics than as poets. The 1930's and '40's were
particularly rich in writers who self-consciously looked for the
roots of what they considered to be their withered language in the
dry sand of their times. Their poems provided analytic breakdowns
of the symptoms of their ailing culture. For the most part they
found little reason to hope. During the period in question, Ronald
Bottrall was the perfect example of this kind of poet:
The future
is
not for us, though we can set up
Our barriers, rest in our dead-embered
Sphere, till we come to pause over our last loving-cup
With death.
The very limitation of inspiration we find in these poets im–
parts a kind of importance to their verse. Their persistent con–
sciousness of the failures of the age and culture was a thread on
which our bitterest recognitions were strung: a thread which may
have helped us, may still help us, out of certain mazes. In the na–
ture of the case, these poets were distinctly minor; but all we owe
to minor poets is more than all of us can say.
The Collected Poems of Weldon K ees,
beautifully printed in a
limited edition, is a memorial volume to the poet. On July 18, 1955,
as Mr. Donald Justice's Preface tells us, Weldon Kees's car "was
found abandoned on the approach to Golden Gate Bridge." Kees
was one of those minor poets of bitter recognition whose work
becomes valuable for the future just because the recognition is so
intensely and narrowly focused. The nature of his death naturally
calls Hart Crane to mind; but however one may qualify one's ap–
proval of Crane's work, Kees could never approach him as a poet.
Paradoxically, this is to Kees's credit as a man, for the best poets
are often the most selfish ones, and the nature of Kees's recognitions
was profoundly unselfish and humane. Crane was primarily con–
cerned with the confusions of his own inspiration; Kees's poetry
