BOOKS
291
sophical, lyric, VIsIonary, confessional and historical-all at once and
uniformly. I have deduced this program myself from reading Mr. Ash–
bery's appallingly inconclusive verse, behind which looms the oldest Ez
of the thin late
Cantos.
Unfortunately, except in master hands which
have probably not yet appeared, this technique is bound to seem
eventually like an exercise in defining a void, like the efforts of modem
engineering to achieve a complete vacuum. Phrases, lines and whole
poems are swallowed up in one's growing sense that Ashbery is pre–
occupied with pulling off a stunt extrinsic both to the nature of his
mind, which reaches no higher, it seems to me, than "One can never
change the core of things, and light bums you the harder for it," or
his material, which is of a flat and rather toneless prosiness, a good deal
of the time, and lapses too often into such coynesses as "The sky is a
giant rockinghorse." Maybe I am needlessly ponderous, but I think Mr.
Ashbery is too. I assume he has a gift or the brave, intelligent Wesleyan
editors would not have published him.
Of Mr. Donald Davie's advertised technical skill in traditional
meters I have little to say except that it does not seem very interesting
in itself. He is a Yorkshireman, a Cambridge graduate and teacher at
Cambridge, a spokesman for the group of relatively young Noncon–
formist university men that often appears to consist of nothing but
spokesmen-the poetic face of the new English predilection for Wis–
dom as a national specialty. In Mr. Davie's strict stanzaic verse, elegance
too frequently turns into a species of artsy-craftsy impressionism, com–
posed of all the turns of phrase, truncated echoes, elisions and com–
pressions that can serve to make verse sound like a triple-distilled elixir
of jauntily hard-boiled authority when, in fact, it is being as inexorably
governed by stanzaic requirements as the minor troubadours. Mr. Davie
comes too late, it may be, in the history of English English to enjoy the
naive love of elegance of an early Wilbur. To bring it off in England
now, you need the mind and spirit of an Empson, which Mr. Davie
does not have.
Yet his verse engaged me a good deal as another intelligent voice
from the new leftish Nietzscheanism, one that has put on more pro–
tective clothing (to mix a few metaphors ) and burrowed more deep–
ly behind the gentlemanly facade than any other, and yet remains
like the others obsessed with the nature of puritan Dissent; a strange
mixture of nostalgia for the old luminous grimness and uneasy relief at
the new ambiguity-soaked urbanity; the long shadow of D.H. Lawrence.
Nearly every poem reflects this obsession: how Samuel Beckett got that
way, what the poet's ancestors would have done to elegant Church of
