POETRY CHRONICLE
THE TENNIS COURT OATH. By John Ashbery. Wesl.yen University
Press. $1.25.
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. By Doneld Dllvie. Wesley.,n University
Press. $1.25.
DROWNING WITH OTHERS. By Jemes Dickey. Wesleyen University
Press. $1.25.
POEMS : 1929-1961. By Fr.,ncis Fergusson. Rutgers University Press. $3.50.
The idea of Form
in
poetry
is
no longer either the mystic
talisman nor the red rag it used to be a few decades ago. Yet questions
of form are really more obtrusive now than they were when Eliot,
Blackmur, Tate et al. were breaking a lance with Romanticism.
In John Ashbery the dazzling vatic style of Dylan Thomas or
Roethke's "The Shape of the Fire" has become something cool, business–
like and
very
peculiar. He is listed on the jacket as an art critic for two
European journals, and taking their cue from that the publishers find
him a sort of Surrealist, which may
be
the best definition of this ex–
treme disjointedness that looks at first like the
Angry Penguins
collages,
that famous Australian hoax, but after immersion proves to have a tonal
unity in no way dependent on meter or even cadence conventiaIIy under–
stood, but rather on a cadence of feeling-sight in which things are com–
ing apart, receding into night and distance, clouding over, or just
be–
ing uncomfortable in a peculiarly sober, visionary, matter-of-fact way.
The mind clutches greedily at such lines as "stones of March in the
grey woods," or "... the darkness will have none of you, and you are
folded into it like mint into the sound of haying," but is not often so
rewarded.
It is not yet successful but it is interesting. There is no inevitability
about it, at least to my eyes and ears, but rather an intense scholastic
energy of exclusion, comparable to the Thomist energy of inclusion.
If
you assume, as many of Ashbery's
confreres
seem to, that poetry has
degenerated into technical formulae and rhetorical gimmicks-Wilbur
is perhaps the arch-villain here--then there might be a virtue in not
only confounding conventional prosody and rhetoric-this had been
done already-but also the progressions of mood and tone which identi–
fy a poet as a creature of conventional psychology, vulnerable to con–
descension. No more ranting, then, no more petulance, no more in-group
coziness, no conventional movement in and out of ecstasy via epiphanies
and resurrected myths, no more "music." The
poem
is
to
be
philo-
