PARTISAN
REVIEW
471
Berryman is not a very serious poet (the opposite of
serious,
in this
sense, is
trivial,
not
comic).
He has the very rare gift - Pope had it,
Byron, Auden, sometimes, who else? - of talking good off the cuff
literary criticism (criticism over the drinks, not criticism in the seminar)
in verse: talking about his earliest literary enthusiasms:
I recognised Auden at once as a new master,
I was by then a bit completely with it.
My love for that odd man has never altered
thro' some of his facile bodiless later books.
The place
is
done for, England
&
so on.
The poet mourns but clamps it to a symptom..
How much more concise and memorable this is than when the same
sort of thing is said, with the proper hems, haws, polite hesitations,
in prose.
How fair is it about the new Auden volume,
City Without Walls?
Auden himself, quite a long time ago, described the effort behind his
later poems as "dry farming." He is a great poet, he could never write
a volume one would not want to buy, but I think this is one of his
weakest later volumes: I think part of the difficulty is that he no longer
wants to see England or any part or person of the human or spiritual
universe as "done for," feels as a Christian the arrogance of "clamping
to a symptom" and wants for the first time (though this was also there
in
About the House)
to write about himself, as a person with quirks
and oddities, and about purely personal tastes, loves, loyalties. He can
do the latter chore only in very formal and tricksy elegies and eulogies,
and the former by abruptly disconnected little verse aphorisms, as
b
"Profile," where the "I" of the originals, if one has seen them, often
becomes a "he." He is also an incurable role player, the newest role
being the crusty or crusted Christian Tory, but he is honest enough,
in the title poem, to admit that the main convenience of this role is to
help him to exercise his rhetoric, in a Jeremiah
cum
Juvenal role. Very
many poets, I fancy, would like to be crusted Tories if they could be
with a clear conscience. The past, after all, exists and the future is high–
ly speculative. But one cannot be a crusted Tory with a clear conscience,
however much one physically recoils from the Mrs. Rooseveltian em–
brace of the professional liberal.
Auden, probably like all good poets, has always used ideologies as
elements in composition, points of stress for high rhetoric, rather than
ever being committed to them. But I feel here he is being a bit enclosed,
