472
G. S.
FRASER
though the deliberately unpopular stance permits sharp and pertinent
remarks:
Even Hate should be precise;
very few White Folks
have fucked their mothers.
But this is followed by a moving short bit in which Auden admits that
in the New York subway the only aristocratic faces "he sees are Negro."
The proper self-correction of the poetic intelligence
is
still going on,
but there is a little too much sense of improper constriction within a
much narrower range of styles and modes than Auden used to have.
It
is hard for him to write, I will not say intimately, but spontaneously
about himself, because in his great early days, in shyness or agony,
his self was merely a Wittgensteinian focus on his general perceptions,
not in itself interesting, and because the objectified figures in his poems,
the "characters," have always of course been symptomatic. He is cursed,
as it were, with X-ray eyes.
Reed Whittemore, whose work I wish I had seen before, is a poet
correct in metrics and urbane in diction who resembles Auden at least
in having a pretty wit. Poems that seem very light in touch often have
very deep allegorical and moral layers of meaning. (I wonder how
many admirers of Dante know his letter to Can Grande in which he
says that the story part - the journey through H ell, Purgatory and to
the lower parts of Heaven - conveys merely the literal meaning and
that the poem is, as we would say today, "really about" states of the
human will and their repercussions on themselves. He might have
chosen, for his literal part, a pagan fable or invented a personal story.
Dante himself undercuts all that elaborate discussion between Richards
and Eliot about "poetry and belief.")
An
example of this gift is a good
funny poem about a bullying Public Librarian, Miss Prunewhip, who
keeps the customers in order and makes them put the books hack in
the right places but
is
neurotically or even psychotically scared of the
world outside the library where the blowing leaves and the drifting
faces will not allow themselves to be filed. Academic reader, or intel–
lectual or ideologically committed reader,
de te fabula narratur!
The
world is wider, untidier, more fertile and unpredictable than all our
thoughts about it. But also, for some kinds of people, the inner world,
to be safe, has to be mechanically arranged and dead: and the wild
outer world is the symbol of an inner life that has been dodged, or
refused.
I have seen Auden, as a great poet temporarily hamstrung by a
