PARTISAN REVIEW
603
give to "exist" : a sort of unobserved continuing activity, a quiet "meta–
physical ticking over." Lowell, certainly the most vigoro usly and vari–
ously resourceful of living American poets of his generation, a poet of
brute or angelic intelligence, of almost unbelievable verbal and scholarly
resource, taking, recently, every conceiva ble risk of a crash if he can
keep the car on the r9ad , is eminently contestable.
Strangely, a lot of the contestation has recently come not from
America but from England, where Lowell has recen tly settled.
The Re–
view
is the best, the sharpest magazine of, and about, new poetry we
have had in England since Geoffrey Grigson's
New Verse:
it is a sign
of the change of the times since the mid-1930s that
New Verse
was
mostly poems with some short, often slashing reviews, whereas
The Re–
view
is m ostly reviews and articles (often severe, but not pursuing sever–
ity solely for its own sake) and
some
poems.
There have been earlier numbers than the one ci ted above in
which Lowell got a lot of attention: a wonderful slanting and glancing
tape-recorded interview with Lowell himself ; a n interview with Geoffrey
Grigson, who, as a critic, is a bit like Robert Graves's idea l reader,
"any good housewife," with a nose in the market, the old-fashioned
open stall market of England and Europe, for apples and fish, for the
fresh and the firm, as against the bruised and the stale - Grigson, so to
say, like that housewife, had fin gered and sniffed Lowell frequently, but
never felt he wanted to
buy
him ; and a fine thoughtful critical piece
by J ohn Bayley (a deep, ranging, and se nsitive critic, known of, un–
fairly, by too many readers mainly as Iris Murdoch's husband ) about
the
Notebooks,
in \\'hich he felt that many of these sonnets were like
a rather ruthless mulching down and crushing and mechanically re–
shaping of old poems, as if they might be old automobiles.
~obody
has
said in so many \\'ords, " Lo\\'ell took us in! " But there is, in England
at least, a nagg ing, questioning mood .
It
might be envy, partly. There
doesn' t seem to be a living English poet, of just that ge neration (not
even Larkin, much as Lowell himself admires him ) , with a similar
range of experience ( from historical to hysterical ) or readiness of
rhetorical resource.
Yet points are made that a re valid . Here, from the most recent
number of
The R evieu',
in the course of a n article about Alvarez's
suicide book , are some very di scomforting remarks about Lowell (and ,
incidenta lly, about Sylvia Plath ) . The writer, Clive J ames, who has
sprung into notice only in the last yea r or two, strikes me as the cleverest
0;
th e younger J"eviewers of English poetry. Not, to be sure, that there
is that much competition ; but, even against strong competition, J ames
would stand out:
