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curred to the poet over the course of several months. Both sorts of poems
are well-handled, but the longer ones deserve particular comment in that
they are remarkably free of the long-liners' habitual Whitmania. Opting for a
lack of intensity, Schuyler willingly runs a danger: that his refusal to get
overly worked-up may be carried too far and leave his long poems feeling a
bit slack. The goal he seeks in tuning his verse to such mild tones is the com–
position of genuinely comprehensive poetry that manages to avoid the bom–
bast that has amicted so many of our contenders in that field. Even as
Schuyler has given us confessional verse without the melodrama, so he also
gives us affiatus without the flatulence. Indeed, perhaps the major contribu–
tion of the ew York School as a whole will turn out to be the control it has
imposed on these two native impulses.
Another part of this poet's achievement, and an immensely attractive
one, is that his insistence that nature and the mind are the best metaphors for
one another. In "A Gray Thought" (the gray thought turns out to be a
cloudy sky), he writes oflichen that grows with:
a slowness becoming vast as though
all the universe were an atom
of a filter-able virus in a
head that turns an eye to smile
or frown or stare into other
eyes: and not of gods, but creatures
whose size begins beyond the sense of size ...
These lines make the connection between mind and universe explicit,
an implied comparison whose recall is probably the most fruitful way to read
the many loving descriptions of nature that abound in this volume, the poems
as lush as the verdant landscape paintings the poet likes to use for the jackets
of his books. "Un pictura poesis," as Horace's famous dictum goes, and rarely
has his advice been taken so literally as it has been by the New York poets.
Schuyler not only gives us painterly poems, he gives us poems about paint–
ing, poems dedicated to painters, poems about painters themselves. All this is
not simply an accident of time and place, of the intimacy that existed between
the New York art and literary worlds in the 1950s. Instead, it is the result of
the poet's conviction that the world consists of its appearances, of tis surface.
In a sense, Schuyler'S poetry is deliberately shallow, precisely superficial:
It
is founded on a baroque premise, that if the world is its surface, then the
surface is the poem. Appearances are what count in such poetry, and few
poets are better at painting appearances than James Schuyler.
One must judge poets by their best work, of course, for writers are
