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PARTISAN REVIEW
glimpse at style and temperament-impossible to determine where
one leaves off and the other begins:
There are after all things to be said for prose . I still read it, often
with more profit than I do poetry . I go on using it for letters,
conversation, the recording of dreams, and so forth .... Yet I
persist in seeing it as a mildly nightmarish medium , to which
there is no end:
coterminous with one's very life, and only at rare
and irregular intervals affording that least pause in flight
whereby a given line of poetry creates the desire for
another . .. .
(Merrill)
Hecht, like Merrill, uses his preface to ponder the differences be–
tween poetry and prose with regard to audience; but here the specific
concern, indeed worry, is about the conventions the critic , unlike the
poet, is allowed to use to protect himself:
A book of poems is sent forth nowadays with an unwritten en–
voy ... as a silent prayer and invisible amulet against the
dangers it must encounter; while a critic is allowed a preface in
which to try to forestall and disarm the attacks he imagines may
be levelled against him.... I envision the enemy approaching
on both flanks ..
In contrast to these bravura metaphors, which forecast the
tones of what will follow, Moss seems almost uninflected : neutral,
sensible, mild, not insisting upon his poetic status:
Collections of essays and reviews are usually prefaced by an
apology: despite the look of a miscellany, the taste and sensibility
of the author unites them all.
Fair enough. What then are the figures in these carpets?
As Merrill's preface might serve to hint, he is the most charm–
ing performer and most self-deprecating host to the world of prose .
His airy manner fails, like a flimsy garment, to conceal underlying
structures which offer their own delights. Many of these structures
are in some way double, mirroring symmetries: "scissoring and
mending , " a phrase from the poem "Yannian," describes a major
preoccupation
III
Merrill's work with paradox and change ,
