BOOKS
155
Temperaments-a
study of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James
Merrill, Adrienne Rich, and John Ashbery-and Frank D. McConnell
in
Four Postwar American Novelists-a
study of Saul Bellow, Norman
Mailer, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon-suggest that their writers
are postmodernists who have made no definitive break with modern–
ism. They agree with Poggioli and Calinescu that their postmodernists
belong with the modernists to the large romantic tradition. Their
postmodernists emerge as even more explicitly romantic than the
modernists.
Kalstone's book is singularly unambitious. He is not at all
interested in setting his five poets in a social context, and he only
occasionally compares them to each other and to their great predeces–
sors of the previous generation. He makes no relative evaluations. All
Kalstone sets out to do is to enhance our understanding and apprecia–
tion of his poets, and this he accomplishes through admirably sensitive
and lucid readings that indicate thematic and stylistic continuity and
development and the distinctive virtues for which each poet is to be
appreciated. Since a critic should be judged by what he has set out to
do, Kalstone's book must be accounted successful as an introduction to
these poets.
The only generalization by which Kalstone combines his poets is
this-that they are more frankly autobiographical and somewhat freer
in style than their more formalist predecessors.
It
is clear from both
Kalstone's and McConnell's books that we have seen since World War
II yet another romantic revival, yet another step in the working out of
the romantic idea; so that for the younger poets Blake, Wordsworth,
and Whitman became relevant again as Donne and Marvell had been
for the previous generation. A similar movement took place in criti–
cism when around 1957 a few of us published books that, as an answer
to
the New Critics, gave a high valuation to romanticism and argued
for it as a continuing modern tradition.
Kalstone demonstrates this change in the career of Robert Lowell,
who broke with his modernist style, what he called "myoid New
Criticism religious symbolic poems," when in March 1957 he made a
trip to San Francisco, "the era and setting of Allen Ginsberg," said
Lowell, where "poets were waking up prophets." Out of this trip came
Life Studies
(1959), the volume that marks Lowell's transition to a free
confessional style. Another influence on
Life Studies
was Elizabeth
Bishop, praised by Lowell as "Unerring Muse who makes the casual
perfect." From Bishop Lowell learned-in for example the greatest
poem of
Life Studies,
"Skunk Hour," which is dedicated to her-to
