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PARTISAN REVIEW
He often uses the possessive "my," like this trick of naming, to mean not
that he possesses something, or wants
to ,
but that he has given himself to
it; "my only one, my world" is a recurrent locution for what he cannot help
but love . In "The Lordly Hudson, " the river itself is literal-its beauty
stressed by the poet's verbal repetition-and it has become "our" Hudson;
the "my" has gone up a notch. This could be reality. The fantasy is that
someone else agrees and cares; and beyond the fantasy remains the exile's
lonely joy:
"Driver, what stream is it?" I asked , well knowing
it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing ,
" It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,"
he said, "under the green-grown cliffs."
Be still, heart! no one needs your passionate
suffrage
to
select this glory,
this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs.
" Driver! has this a peer in Europe or the East? "
" No no! " he said. Home! Home!
be quiet, heart! this is our lordly Hudson
and has no peer in Europe or the East,
this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! home! home!
As a stylist, Goodman has the defects of his virtues . I am personally
unhappy that he lacks the most central gift in poetry next to a good ear, a
metaphoric imagination. His metaphors are few , and commonly banal . I
suspect this correlates with his mistrust of the luxurious and wasteful, that
he inclined to think of metaphor as a merely decorative device, something to
sugar the spoon. In " Little Prayers and Finite Experience" he observes that
his bias is toward the literal. He can' t, as he says, even change the names of
his lovers when he writes about them. The use of " symbols" strikes him as
sophomoric. Perhaps the reason is that he sees the world as ethics, not meta–
physics, so that the flat line of talk he lays down in verses directs itself
always forward, not laterally or globally, toward the discovery of corres–
pondences and syntheses. That diminishes the world , and sacrifices depth ,
as his plain style forfeits resonance. "Say my poems, " he says; and we can
say them, but not sing them.
On the other hand , the virtues . If American critics valued formal
