470
G. S. FRASER
(age unknown) and to me an exceptionally attractive and promising
one. The big names here for 'Older readers are Berryman and Auden,
for younger readers probably Hughes and Snyder. Looking down the
list as far as Mr. Logan we have poets who, whatever their political
politics, are poetically traditionalists (remembering Eliot's dictum that
originality is not a clean break with the tradition but some development
of it that subtly alters our perspective on the tradition as a whole). From
Ted Hughes's
Crow
downward the poets are more like Eliot's clean–
break poet (the "absolute originality" which would be admirable, he
thought, but it just can't be had).
Accepted critical categories cease very usefully to apply. Hughes is
a myth-writer, Denise Levertov a wisdom writer, Miss Swenson a seri–
ous joker. Dickey, older than any 'Of these, knows what the tradition is
about, but is engaged in a kind of (fairly humane) all-in wrestling
match with it. A test for dividing the two groups is the willingness or
unwillingness to write poems about, or in terms of, 'Other poets or poems,
well-established myths, art forms. Another test is whether the New
Critics' question "How consistently does this thing on the page hold
together?" seems critically relevant. One is engaging with Hughes,
Levertov, Swenson, Dickey and Snyder (use of
haiku
and imagist tradi–
tion to trigger off mystical perceptions) much more in terms of re–
sponse to total attitude, life stance, than in terms of analyzable poetic
success. The poet, let us say, seeks to overthrow the dictatorship of the
poem.
As a middle-aged man, brought up in the days when (Gad, sir!)
literature
was
literature, my habit-bound bias is of course in favor of
the first group. But I shall try (and that also dates me) to be fair.
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
and the earlier short poems made me
admire Berryman very much, but
The Dream Songs,
which almost
everybody else went overboard about, seemed to me pretentious dood–
lings. They were poems, perhaps, arising from some wholly inner crisis,
and the point about Berryman is that he is essentially an objective,
observant, comically observant poet (himself, often, as one of the comic
objects). He is an extrovert, with a passion for telling anecdotes.
Loue
and Fame
as a set of autobiographical anecdotes from school and col–
lege days onward reminds me of Thurber's
My Life and Hard Times
or (the anecdote of the drunken wife of the very influential critic, at
the New York party, whom nobody will lay, either because, like one
man, they know how influential the critic is, or because, like the Berry–
man-persona
in the poem, they are even more drunk than she is her–
self) of Edmund Wilson's
I Thought of Daisy.
This is not to say that
