PARTISAN REVIEW
607
the South and learned there his essential Northernness, by an awareness
of history that could have made him a great academic historian, by
being a kind of radical and a kind of aristocrat at once, by reaching
one hand back to Henry Adams and another forward to Ginsberg, he is
representatively American in a way that no English poet of this time
can be representatively English (England, culturally, is relapsing into
the situation of the Heptarchy: there are Anglo-Welsh, Ulster, Angler–
Irish, Anglo-Scots, Lowlands, Northumbrian poets, and so on).
It
is
range of experience and pounce of intelligence that do it. No doubt,
in his recent sonnet poems, Lowell (like MacNeice in his "middle
stretch" ) is a little flogging himself along, making will and determina–
tion take the place of spontaneity. (Not that his poems, agonizingly
struggling toward utterance, were ever "spontaneous" in any facile
sense; and not that Lowell, except in an odd stanza here and there
about Maine, say, is ever a "lyrical" poet: but still there is a difference
between the poem painfully struggling to be born and the poem being
pushed into existence, because the poet must keep his hand in.) No
doubt James is right, and he ought not to be facile about Auschwitz.
He is not facile about America. And if he seems, for the time being, to
have settled in England, there is a chance, no doubt, that from that
distance he may recreate a marvelously rich America, as Eliot did, very
late in life, in "The Dry Salvages."
G. S.
Fraser
Lenore Marshall's novels, short stories, poetry, and articles
have been widely acclaimed. This volume of stories is de–
voted to chronicling the little event that stands for so much.
"Lenore Marshall's stories have the kind of purity and pas–
sion she had as a person. They are finely wrought, and very
moving."-WILLlAM PHILLIPS,
Partisan Review
I
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