BOOKS
135
appears here in its entirety, as does all of his major sequence "Spectral
Emanations. "
How few of the steps recorded in this book turn out to be false
ones, how little time, over the decades, has John Hollander spent trying
on the current style or retuning his poetic voice. Most of Hollander's
characteristic concerns and virtues - his interest in Wittgenstein and in
the power and limits of poetic language, his erudition that second
thoughts show to be more than playful, his prodigious technical skill, his
interest in
ekphrasis
as a branch of ethical and metaphysical investigation -
all of these show amply
even
in
A Crackling oj Thorns,
which Auden
picked as the Yale Younger Poets volume for 1958. Some poems in that
volume, such as "The Great Bear" or "The Lady's Maid's Song," would
not have seemed out of place even in
Tesserae.
It is striking not only
how strongly Hollander's career is unified by his exploration of the many
branches of one big problem (what is the relationship between particular
poetic forms and the characteristic truths they are able to disclose), but
also how often the arguments critics make about poetry are already issues
argued out in the poetry itself.
Consider for instance the oft-repeated exclamation: "But all this is
just poetry about poetry! I wanted to hear poetry about life!" Tempting
as it is to respond to this with an argument
ad hominem,
Hollander's
own response (in
Powers oj Thirteen)
is delicate, ruefully comic, and more
candid even than the answer Sidney makes to the same charge in
Astrophel and Stella:
When, aping the literary lover, his eye filled
With one star, I at eighteen tried rhyming into bed
A tall, dark girl named Barbara, now dead, everyone
Had an earful of my earnest conceits, studious
Wit, and half-concealments of the way I'd hoped we'd end
Up; and the more contrived my rhynting became, the more
It meant about desire (this the ear-filled ones could not
Understand). I marvelled, dazed, at what was done by less
Textual souls for fun; I hoped to, like the girl-shy Yeats,
Pass through the tenderest of gates, and discharge with
A mighty spasm in her deep, romantic chasm .
The truth was that, though she and I rhymed a few times my
Young words on their paper sheet had far more joy than we.
Impatience with poetry about poetry is a form of impatience with
poetry
qlla
poetry: "Cut out the fancy stuff and speak the truth" is a way
of putting certain kinds of truth out of reach, analogolls to the vainglo-
