BOOKS
137
find
Autumn Journal
a moving documentary of the conscience of the
in–
tellectual
in
the late thirties. One can easily criticize it on technical
grounds: by reverting,
in
parts, to a natural prose, the whole would
surely have gained in honesty and effect. But each time I ·return to it
I am astonished at its clarity, its volatility, its completeness. It is a
brave attempt to keep in touch with everything.
If
it becomes a
purgatory of words which does not purge, a sea which does not ablute,
that also is part of its honesty. In MacNeice's poetry of the fifties
a new capability is added: a purged intensity of speech, a firmer ac–
ceptance of the authority of form. There is a return of the repressed,
of the purely esthetic elements, which is also a return to the beginning,
for he was always basically a poet in love with the classics, seeking to
modernize yet not too much . "Didymus," one of his neatest poems,
classical in inspiration yet modern in theme, remains therefore his best
epitaph:
R efusing to fall in lo ve with God, he gave
Himself to the love of created things,
Accepting only what he could see, a river
Full of the shadows of swallows' wings
That dipped and skimmed the water; he would not
Ask where the water ran ,or why.
When he died a swallow seemed to plunge
Into the reflected, the wrong sky.
Mr. Nemerov participates in this secular
askesis:
not to fall in love
with God, with Abstraction, with Romance. Perhaps we are all born
into Romance, but the modern poet, a prodigal, rejects his birthright.
Realism, however, is not less a corruption of reality. The modern poet
often wishes to be saved from realism as Yeats had wished to
be
"saved
from abstraction," though MacNeice was prevented by his excessive
fear of art from breaking out of the "makeshift present" toward the
"full leaf of insight and bloom of image." In fact, the necessary break
with realism, though not with reality, the return to abstraction, though
not to metaphysics, has been a predominantly American feat; and Mr.
Nemerov, following Wallace Stevens, strives again for a total vision
of things. He announces easily that his theme is both world and thought,
"The thought of something and the thought of thought." This should
make him "A trader doubly burdened," yet Nemerov, like Stevens, is
strangely light-hearted about the whole enterprise, as if announcing
the true subject were already a cure.
There does not seem to be an essential difference in structure or
quality, between the poems written around 1950 and his recent work. The
