PARTISAN REVIEW
LETTERS
UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT
Sirs:
As a person who made an (un–
successful) effort to review
Re–
learning the Alphabet
by Denise
Levertov briefly
&
succinctly, I am
sympathetic with G. S. Fraser as
he attempts to review it in your
winter issue
(PR
No.4, 19'71 , p.
467) after establishing a context
of good guys and bad guys (and
"Ladies" - his word) in two sen–
tences. I don't share his criteria.
But he assures us that a difference
between his and those of the reader
will not mislead the reader: "At
some stage every critic, to adapt
de Gourmont, must generalize his
prejudices into rules: it is safe
enough for the reader if he knows
what the prejudices are" (p. 478).
His assurance would probably be
true if his report on the poetry
were accurate. He writes, "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- estab–
lished myths, art forms" (p. 470).
Good guys are willing, bad aren't.
The relegation of
Relearning the
Alphabet
to the second (bad) sec–
tion suggests to the review-reader
that Miss Levertov has no literary
or mythological poems in her re–
cent book. How misleading. Two
of her finest poems in the volume
are "Advent 1966" and "A Tree
Telling of Orpheus." The first is
a poem "in terms of" another
poem
(Southwell's
"Burning
Babe" ); the second is a poem
"about" a well-established myth.
Two of her so-called Embroideries
have a literary matrix. "Cloax" is
a meditation on an epigraph from
Yeats (a poem against strait–
jacketing and smothering, one
471
needs to inform the reader, in case
the Fraser-phrase "an occasional fit
of the Mother-Smothers" misleads
the review-reader into thinking
that Miss Levertov is claustrophi–
liac). Other poems allude to Rim–
baud, Baudelaire, Keats, Hopkins,
Rilke. Indeed, one might object
that
Relearning the Alphabet
is too
literary. But my object in the pres–
ent note is not to challenge the
judgment of Fraser ; it is to chal–
lenge the accuracy of his report on
the poems.
Sirs:
Tony Stoneburner
Granville, Ohio
I can no longer restrain myself
from writing you about the em–
barrasingly bad Winter 1971-72
issue of
Partisan.
The main cause of my grief and
anger is the review by G. S. Fraser
of fourteen (14!) books of poetry
in a scant ten pages or so. A poet
of the talent and interest of Denise
Levertov is thereby relegated to
two sentences. Please, Mr. Phillips,
you owe it to yourself as well as
to your readership to make sure
that her book is reviewed in a sub–
sequent issue.
In addition to the grievous in–
sult rendered Miss Levertov, who
will of course survive, we must
consider the general level of Mr.
Fraser's review. The writing is a
bad joke; that forced attempt to be
"relaxed," and those
obiter dicta
that seem like rejects from a soph–
omore survey course, not to men–
tion such hackneyed howlers as
"the Mrs. Rooseveltian embrace
of the professional liberal" (Mr.
Fraser must think he's writing for
a "pink rag" to throw in such a
phrase) and a "Wittgensteinian
focus on his general perceptions."
But surely you knew the piece
