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GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN
prosiness and the scattering of passion over a miscellaneous range of
things, I do not have to speak. The quoted poem raises a more important
issue. Mr. Dugan's best pieces are about the condition of the poet. Not
always directly so: "A Gift's Accompaniment" describes the elaborate
setting of a tiny jewel, but this setting, "the silver multiple / details,
man-houred craftily / around that stone," are surely the poetic form
itself elaborating a small-hearted substance. The question I have is
not about the poet's tendency to talk shop, which might indeed indicate
a small substance. I query rather the
way
in which he talks shop. That
he considers himself primarily a craftsman may come as a relief after
so many seer-poets, yet is he not undervaluing the role of poetry? And
is his spiritual poverty as extreme as his moving verses on the beggar
suggest? Every poet has his topos of modesty, but this volume features
too great a proportion of apology to achievement. Especially since some
of the finest poems are the apologies. Both "Admonitor: A Pearl for
Arrogance" and "The Life and Death of the Cantata System" are,
the one explicitly, the other obliquely, about the greater vision they
evade. Mr. Dugan must undertake larger poems, must risk more. Other–
wise his success will rest on the image he projects of a prankish talent.
Eat crow, but nobly; walk gently with a big stick: the mode is graceful
but also exhibitionistic.
Robert Graves, so gossipy about other religions, never profanes
his own. Not one of his
New Poems
is uninteresting or unworthy of the
craft. Though it is a slender volume, at least three or four poems in it
will survive because they move in a time of their own. "The Cliff Edge,"
"The Miller's Man," and "The Winged Heart' are perfect in their
reticence: a modicum of words, a hinted substance, and a religious
simplification of knowledge. Their subject is, as it has ever been, the
"mystery" of the relationship between man, woman and muse. But they
are also, therefore, about every traditional theme: passion, purity, time,
words, sympathetic magic. Elemental situations are expressed in elemental
symbols:
Alone, together,
Recalling little, prophesying less,
We watch the serpent, crushed by your bare heel,
Rainbow his scales in a deathward agony.
But elemental and commonplace lie very close together. A perfect
sense of pitch is often needed to distinguish them and to appreciate these
poems. Graves is the most classical of the modern Romantics and his
