PARTISAN
REVIEW
475
his earlier volumes not necessarily those which other people might think
the best but those which are in his poetic character, as it has developed,
and those which illustrate a mode of poetic deviousness which he prefers
to that of plain speaking. That he seems such a natural plain speaker
perhaps is part of the deviousness. There is a good early poem, for in–
stance, about how patronage disguises itself as liberalism:
Do not embrace your mind's new Negro friend
Or
embarrass the blackballed Jew with membership:
There must be years of atonement first, and even then
You may still be the blundering raconteur
With the wrong story, and they may still be free.
The deviousness, the "twist in the plotting,"
is
in the last six words in
the stanza -
«And they may still be free":
they make one go back and
read the whole stanza again. There is a similar deviousness in a poem
about Robert Frost, a recent one, memorial. Meredith had been told
that after a certain stage Frost's attention could be held only by telling
him interesting, but character-revealing, lies. He told Frost tall but, I
take it, true stories about his exploits on an aircraft carrier and Frost
listened for the first time with respect. (But to a young hero, or a
really plausible and well-informed liar?) You can read this fine poem
I think four ways:
lie-lie: lie-truth: truth-lie: truth-truth.
(The first
item is our judgment of Meredith's story to Frost in itself, the second
our judgment of Frost's judgment on Meredith's story.) This plain
deviousness is a most unusual gift. And the Frost poem is one of the
few
unsentimental
memorial poems on a recently dead poet I have ever
read and a fine character study of a poet whose character, like his
poetry, grows more puzzling the more simple you began by thinking it.
Frost was a pretty devious poet, too.
W. S. Merwin, one of the few impeccable verse craftsmen of our
time, would have had far wider fame in another period, perhaps in
another country, the late eighteenth-century period of Schiller, Goethe,
Holderlin, of incipient romanticism chastened by a yearning (in itself
romantic) for pure classical- Greek rather than Romano-Hellenistic,
for what the Greek in itself was like had just been discovered - general–
ity, simplicity, distance, coldly representative power, sense of the type:
in a word,
coldness.
(Leave it aside that in their politics the Greeks
were hot, sweaty, unscrupulous, emotional, as they are today. The
art
matters and it doesn't sweat.) Most famous poets today are interested
in either the individual or the sense of communal life. Merwin, at one
remove, is interested in the fable or myth as representing, or rather
making clear, recurrent human traps and temptations. He does not
