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Recent Poetry

An Omnibus Review

Selected Poems by Marianne Moore (Introduction by T. S. Eliot). Macmillan

Six Sides to a Man by Merrill Moore, with an epilogue by Louis Untermeyer. Harcourt, Brace

Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow by Jesse Stuart. Dutton

Strange Holiness by Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Macmillan

Panic, A Play in Verse by Archibald MacLeish. Houghton Mifflin

Vienna and Poems by Stephen Spender. Random House

Collected Poems, 1929–1933, & A Hope for Poetry by C. Day Lewis. Random House

Dance of Fire by Lola Ridge. Smith and Haas

A Winter Diary and Other Poems by Mark Van Doren. Macmillan

Permit Me Voyage by James Agee with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish. Yale UP

Poems, et cetera by David Greenhood. Helen and Bruce Gentry

Chorus for Survival by Horace Gregory. Covici-Friede

No Thanks by e. e. cummings. Golden Eagle Press

Poems by Kenneth Fearing (Introduction by Edward Dahlberg). Dynamo

The Southern Review, July 1935, 164–177

A survey of recent poetry should begin with the Selected Poems of Marianne Moore, as Miss Moore would merit special honors by the members of her own Guild. It is customary to think of her as adept at expressing a tiny corner of experience—but inasmuch as this corner is close to the very core of poetry, a reader who is willing to meet her work halfway, bringing something in exchange for what he would take, may discover in her observations a quality or method that can be applied to many matters beyond her particular subjects. “These people liked small things,” she writes—and she is one of them—yet behind her miniatures there seem to lie larger equivalents, as a sprawling city is the equivalent of its neat contours on a map, or as one may learn something radical about the history of centuries by watching a few children at play in the backyard. She shows sympathy with little animals, not for their lowliness, but because of their exceptional precision, the “great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.” She describes vessels at sea that “progress white and rigid as if in a groove,” or the mountain goat, “its eye fixed on the waterfall which never seems to fall,” thereby exemplifying her kind of remoteness; and if she were discussing the newest model of an automobile, I think that she could somehow contrive to suggest an antiquarian’s interest. There is nothing more unlike her work than a steamroller, a difference which probably explains why she has included in her collection a withering attack upon one, beginning

The illustration

is nothing to you without the application.

You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down

into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on

them.

The great steamroller of political and economic necessities which has been flattening us out may prevent the general public, and even many poets, from feeling the full value of Miss Moore’s work. Her linguistic subtlety may often be lost on those who were not listening attentively enough to be surprised. Her deft invention of something that might be called the “poetic editorial” may not communicate its savor to us after we have been too violently assailed by the “big bow wow stuff” all about us. And if we read hastily, her conversational understatement may conceal from us the range and boldness of her responsiveness, as in her astounding poem, “An Octopus of Ice.” In his introduction to the volume, T. S. Eliot selects the word genuineness as the mark of her work. Greatness, he says, is a quality for the future to decide upon—but the genuineness of a work can be discerned by an author’s contemporaries. At a time when people are everywhere climbing upon bandwagons, let me hasten on this issue at least, to climb upon a bandwagon with Mr. Eliot. He writes: “The genuineness of poetry is something which we have warrant for believing that a small number, but only a small number, of contemporary readers can recognize.” I wish hereby to enlist formally in this distinguished company—and to state my conviction that all those of Miss Moore’s Guild, all poets of all persuasions, should vote with me and Eliot for Miss Moore’s genuineness.

It is not merely a correspondence of name that takes me next to Six Sides to a Man, a collection of sonnets by Merrill Moore, with an “Epilogue, by way of advertisement,” by Louis Untermeyer. I should not dare to call Merrill Moore a steamroller, after the mean things that have been said about one—and I will admit that nearly every writer must seem somewhat blunt if we pick up his work just after laying down Miss Moore’s—but his gusto and dash are wholly the opposite of Miss Moore’s meticulousness. Mr. Untermeyer, writing less as editor and critic than as accountant, calculates that Dr. Moore, who is now thirty-one, has written “approximately twenty-five thousand idiomatic, hybrid, or ‘American’ sonnets.” These sonnets suffer considerably from lack of revision—but if you read them as hastily as they were written, hurrying rapidly from one to the next, you will gradually come to see a “way of life” emerging, as the poet details the incidents of his day with an almost gluttonous curiosity. It is modesty on his part to call himself but six-sided. He seems to have as many sides as there are subjects—and what we get is a sequence of quick, haphazard matchings, for he has learned to be engrossed in experience as a clutter. That is: by finding things very noteworthy, he can avoid the discouragement of those who find things very disordered. This mode of “acceptance” may go far to explain his great vitality.

Dr. Moore is a kind of urban Jesse Stuart. Like the author of Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow, he mars the sonnet (the most statuesque of forms) by adapting it to the conveniences of completely impromptu statements, getting something that has fourteen lines, with approximately ten syllables to the line, but is otherwise wholly free to follow the dictates of accident. And he writes with the same rough spontaneity as Jesse Stuart (“blurt out your dreams”), though the world of the Kentucky mountaineer is a much simpler one—and whereas Stuart does not revise because of naïvete, Moore probably forgoes revision because of restlessness. Moore speculates easily on much that Stuart would tend to lump together as a vague forbidding Shape, to be hated as it encroached upon the simplicities of his people, who resent the abstractions of politics, finance, and the law, and who in maturity ask the same protectiveness of the soil as a mother provided them in childhood. “Love in the flesh is greater than the mind,” writes Stuart, all of whose poems spring from the most concrete of facts. And it should be noted that this rustic poet, unlike most urbanized poets of the soil, writes poems as full of characters as a novel. Nature for him does not point towards privacy and remoteness, but towards the barn dance. This mind that yields to reverie as it follows the turning sod is well stocked with gossip and local lore, in which the inhabitants of the graveyard still figure because their stories remain a vital part of the community.

The other aspect of Nature (as a place of symbolic communion for a man essentially lonely) is to be found in Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s Strange Holiness. Mr. Coffin has something of Miss Moore’s engrossment in the fastidious ways of animals—but whereas she can consider them primarily as connoisseur, Mr. Coffin for all his admiration remembers that on occasion he must destroy them, when they threaten to crowd him from his farm. His poem, “The Haters,” recounting the forms of life (the “dispossessed”) that struggle to assert themselves in opposition to his plans and purposes (“It is by the cellar they come first”) perhaps gives most clearly the quality of his mind, the way in which comfort and discomfort, kindness and cruelty, are intermingled for him. The poet is made devout by the look of terror in a shot or frightened animal’s eye. He can convey to us, quite solemnly, the uneasy expectancy of a summer night, as a storm slowly approaches. The pleasures he celebrates have a touch of melancholy, even when he notes the

Gentle purrs that came and went

In the cat stretched out content.

Almost persecutionally encircling him, there is the burning animation of non-human life. Hence he can write a brilliant lyric on bees, “shooting hot from flower to flower”; and his contemplative tributes to a cow being milked are very moving. In “First Flight” he characteristically employs the narrative of an airplane ride purely as a means of reaffirming in a new way his attachment to the soil. Only occasionally does his somber mythology get too much for us: we may accept it that the spider is not unkind, but simply industrious and scrupulous in her fashion—yet he does perhaps strain at our limits of endurance when suggesting, in his poem “The Bull Inside,” that this turbulent animal has accepted a check upon himself, somewhat in line with neo-Humanist doctrines of decorum, “for the sake of small calves to come.” And there are times when his sense of natural awesomeness makes us realize why men have been driven to machines, business, finance, and the state, whereby they may, with distinct relief, contemplate not mystery, but either craft or quackery, not sacrosanct wisdom the thought of which makes us breathe wrong, but the foibles of comedy—not man in nature, but man in society.

Indeed, one might roughly distinguish the tragic from the comic by saying that the tragic deals with man in nature, while the picture of man in society is comic. But one should have to modify this statement forthwith, by admitting that the materials of comedy themselves become tragic when some aspect of society is treated as a force. The distinction applies to Archibald MacLeish’s new play in verse, Panic, which has for its subject a phenomenon so essentially social as a collapse in our financial institutions, yet contrives to give the theme a fully tragic quality. One could only guess why an author as well acquainted with business phenomena as MacLeish, an editor of Fortune, should choose to picture a Wall Street crash in so magical a fashion. It is possible that the almost religious accents of fatality present here stem from some desire for symbolic self-immolation on the part of the author. This poem is not written to herald the rise of the masses, but as a dirge for the fall of a banker. The Marxian “scientific” prophecies of capitalist decay are transformed into the tonalities of a Shakespearean soothsayer, or a mystic foreboding of death such as permeates the opening of a play by Maeterlinck. The only fully developed characters are the banker McGafferty and his mistress Ione—and as a matter of fact, one of the most effective scenes in the play profits by the contrast between the super-personal or non-personal quality of the plot in general and the intimate conversation of this couple (the interweaving of private relationships and broad historic trends such as distinguishes Malraux’s novel of the Chinese revolution, Man’s Fate).

No one seems to have noted how greatly the role of the messenger in Greek drama has been magnified in Panic. The course of the action is maintained by a steady bombardment of news: as read aloud by a throng “in a street before an electric news bulletin of the Times Square type—moving words in lighted letters,” as read from the tape of the ticker in McGafferty’s office, and as received by telephone. While all the world collapses, the organized distribution of public intelligence remains in perfect order. Indeed, we have scarcely witnessed the grim intrusion of The Blind Man and his radical companions in McGafferty’s office, before we hear the voices of the people in the street reading the same information from the flicker of the news bulletin. Reports continue to pour in, until the banker finally wilts before the suggestiveness of their climactic arrangement. The logic of life and effort as he knew it is gone—and he is made ready to destroy himself.

The success with which MacLeish has met the problem of writing poetic drama makes me very enthusiastic about Panic. I consider it no slight triumph for a man to take a current issue, surrounded with the most realistic connotations, and treat it in a style neither pompous nor lame. Here again, I think, MacLeish has solved much of his problem by recourse to news. For many of the speeches that would have been least amenable to poetic formalization (such as lists of bank failures) are given the necessary amount of distinction, while still seeming “natural,” by reason of the fact that they are phrased in the tone of headlines or telegrams. When the people from the street are reading from the bulletin, or Immelman is reading from the ticker, the correspondence is of course complete. But again and again we find the plot upheld by information or judgments whose expression gravitates about the conventions of news-writing. For this reason lines can seem “natural” even when beginning bluntly with nouns (the appropriate definite or indefinite article being omitted), and when marked by forms of ellipsis totally alien to conversational syntax (as when a character says: “He helping is hope”).

MacLeish asserts in his introduction: “The classical rhythm equivalent to American speech would be more nearly the trochee or the dactyl than the iamb of blank verse.” But I hold that this remark really applies most aptly to written forms, the headline and telegraphic styles. Indeed, it is where the plot is carried by monologue (as the plot of history is conveyed in the daily press by monologue) that MacLeish’s style truly observes his injunction to “descend from stressed syllables” rather than (as in blank verse) “rise toward stressed syllables.” The further his play departs from recitation and the closer it comes to true dramatic dialogue, the stronger is the tendency of the ear to hear the lines as iambic, regardless of his typographical divisions. But as evidence of how subtly MacLeish elaborates the headline conventions, and as corroboration for my belief that in his reliance upon news (both as the core of his dramatic causation and as the key for his style) he has solved the poet’s problem of acquiring both conventionalization and “naturalness” at once, I might quote this fragment from a speech by The Blind Man:

Knowing

Never for what fault or

Failing of ours is altered the

World’s future suddenly—Spilling of what blood:

Thing done or not done:

Holy duty forgotten—Knowing neither the fault nor the

Finder—nevertheless

We know well His messenger!

Death we have always known!

MacLeish writes that “the rhythms of contemporary American speech . . . are nervous, not muscular; excited, not deliberate; vivid, not proud.” Which may or may not be true—but as I read the above verses, I felt that their peculiar quality of “nervousness,” “excitement,” and “vividness” was not that of speech at all, but the strange mixture of jerkiness and fluency that impresses one when following the galvanic convulsions of a news ticker.

A poet’s symbols probably aim at “condensation” in this way: If he had had a certain attitude towards his parents at one period in his life, and if at other periods he had had an attitude of the same quality towards his companions, his studies, his art, and finally his politics, he might attempt to “integrate” himself by inventing symbolic devices that telescoped all these segments into one. Thus, were we discerning enough, MacLeish’s imaginative identification of himself with the banker who wills to die could probably be traced to the point where his present political emphasis is found to merge with his earlier esthetic one. The symbolism of self-immolation has always been present in his work—and in MacLeish there is a parricidal ingredient. During his days as an esthete, he revealed something of the emotional elements in his ars poetica when he likened a good line of verse to the firm resounding of the ax as it sinks into the tree. We may not be extravagant if we remember, in this connection, that the tree is a “patriarch,” that it stands as the symbol of shelter and authority (oh woodman, spare it)—hence we may suspect what devious condensations are taking place when this poet, on turning from estheticism to politics, pictures a capitalist leader (a “father”?) made ready to die.

The suggestion becomes more plausible when we note, in the young English Communist poets, a clear attempt at the coordinating of their politics with their earlier family relationships. They talk explicitly of their old quarrels with the father (quarrels which, they hint on occasion, even led to sexual gnarling)—and they explicitly merge this old relationship with their new political emphasis by a somewhat magical doctrine of ancestor-worship. In the surprising reversals of this doctrine, a man intellectually reborn can choose his forbears. Thus Stephen Spender, in his recent poem, “Vienna,” concerns himself deeply with such symbolic reorganization. “I think often of a woman,” he says—and ends the stanza of his tribute to her,

It surely was my father

His dry love his dry falling

Through dust and death to stamp my feature

That made me ever fear that fortunate posture.

In the men who died fighting at the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, however, he finds a “father principle” for his new self—and his poem ends

These are

Our ancestors.

The same symbolic pattern lies at the base of C. Day Lewis’s work. His long essay, “A Hope for Poetry,” printed in his volume of Collected Poems, begins with a figure of speech quite relevant to my thesis: “In English poetry there have been several occasions on which the younger son, fretting against parental authority, weary of routine work on the home farm, suspecting too that the soil needs a rest, has packed his bag and set out for a far country.” He proceeds to claim “Hopkins, Owen and Eliot as our immediate ancestors.” He cites Stephen Spender’s poem, “I think continually of those who were truly great,” as indication of what “real ancestors” are. And he quotes from Auden’s The Orators:

It wasn’t till I was sixteen and a half that he (an uncle) invited me to his flat. We had champagne for dinner. When I left I knew who and what he was—my real ancestor.

I most prize in our poets, as distinct from the simple rationalistic pamphleteer, publicist, or economist, the fact that they are alive to the full complexities of human readjustment. Implicit in their work is the knowledge that, with an honest and earnest man, any notable shift of cultural emphasis requires a great deal of “consolidation.” A change in political affiliations, for instance, may not be merely a choice of expedients, as the more superficial pragmatists would suggest; it may involve all sorts of other factors grounded in one’s past. One may not feel that, for him, the particular concern of the three English poets with their “ancestry” is important. The important thing to me is their clear awareness of the fact that a man’s need of “integration” or “fusion” involves factors more complex, and closer to “magic,” than rationalistic oversimplifications of political necessities can reveal.

Lola Ridge is similarly concerned with symbolic mergers in her Dance of Fire, issued in a cover and jacket of deeply glowing bronze that arrestingly announces the tenor of her work. As for “condensation”: in the twenty-eight sonnets of her “Via Ignis” she evolves a kind of dithyrambic metaphysics about the symbol of fire. With Heracleitan thoroughness she finds us “living in a dynasty of fire,” “still in the midst of the fire dance,” for “the flame that breaks down, fuses and forms is still burning nakedly in humanity.” Hence our agitation—to which she holds out the hope that “we may come forth, for a period, into the time of light.” Thus we have a universal burning, existence as trial by fire—and we have a transcendent burning, light. Her sonnets are a highly ritualized statement of her key metaphor. By the unifications of her myth, all that is most significant in experience is drawn together: the “infuriate spark” in us, and in our “blood singing to the ancient horn”; the “tind’rous structure of the heart”; the

lambent menace in the brain,

Too fraught with tensions, which the blood inspires

In radiant passage;

the upheavals of storm, the sea, and nebulae; the “music over heaven”; the sun; the “silver truce,” “effulgence on the waters glistering”; “the lion and the burning dove”; the jungle, history arising from the jungle, the Chosen sacrificed for history, and finally, since such rigorous pursuit will usually call forth in some form its own negation, we come to poems on the “Ice Heart,” the “vise of glaciers closing,” and her apostrophe:

Draw near, O near, to the ice-heart! abase

This blood before the white contagious death

Till it congeal in harmony.

There is no better proof of her deep attachment to her symbolism than the lovely sonnet “Is not this April of our brief desire” (where she Platonically interprets spring as the frail manifestation of some vaster awakening), or in her devout saluting of the dawn. But the full reward of her earnestness is to be seen in “Three Men Die,” a tribute which one can justly call exalted, to the secular martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, themselves pictured in light, their nerves burnt in the raw electric fire. Many a poet will be found to have made devotional services of his own, semi-private compensations for the lacunae or irrelevance in the symbols of institutional religion. But no one could be more definitely focused upon such effort than Lola Ridge in her recent volume.

If I were required to characterize Mark Van Doren’s A Winter Diary and Other Poems in but one word, I should use the word “humble.” I do not mean that this poet makes a thriving business of humbleness (as the Frenchman Francis Jammes has done quite effectively). I refer to the fact that, when gripped by emotions, the author of these candid poems makes his reports, not with Byronic assertiveness, not with the air of one who would suggest that generous portions are his birthright, but apologetically—with timidity, regret, sorrow, and (at times of encouragement) gratitude. As a consequence, though his verse is lacking in brilliance, it does possess a subdued kind of poignancy. The long opening poem, a modernized extension of Whittier’s “Snowbound” (plus something of the moralistic schedule we get in Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”), the record of a city family’s sojourn in the country from fall to spring, will not satisfy those who demand that the line of poetry be packed—yet in its unassuming way it suggests the appropriate seasonal moods with penetration, and sets the memory to vibrating. Though mainly a record of mild delights, the poem made me quite melancholy, having as it does so many lines that seemed to me wholly gray (“Slap, slap, the sound of car chains going by”). There is also a sonnet sequence, a troubled account of love, the quality of the whole well pointed in these opening lines:

I said: It will not blow this way again;

The branches of my life too soon are old;

The wind is kind to early-withered men

Lest they remember and confess the cold.

I said, and scarcely knew that it was I,

Hanging my leaves there in the springless year.

I said; and did not listen to a high,

Loud sound of March that filled the woods with fear.

Then it was all around me, till at last

Love like a hurricane of hate was blowing

Bruising me everywhere. Yet I was fast,

And stood among the ruins of his going.

Only the after stillness came and showed

These blossoms on me everywhere, like blood.

And perhaps not unrelated in essence, we have another long poem, “The Eyes,” suggesting an obsession of guilt prior to offense. The many short lyrics reinforce the note of sad decline that seems to motivate the poet’s output, one of the best formed being “This Amber Sunstream,” which ends

No living man in any western room

But sits at amber sunset round a tomb.

James Agee’s Permit Me Voyage, which bears the endorsement of a foreword by Archibald MacLeish, I find somewhat difficult to characterize. One must respect it for its firm workmanship throughout, but at the same time one must feel that the poet is still somewhat ambiguous as regards the coordinates he lives by (no great disgrace, as he is still in his twenties). His “Epithalamium” is an extremely able record of the marriage night, with tactful interspersing of attendant meditations. And a symbolic narrative, “Ann Garner,” gives an impressive sense of rigor by picturing the stone-like kernel of silence that fell upon a woman whose child was still-born. “Life was in death,” he writes, as he symbolizes purgatorial moods, symbolic curses. The book also contains a long “Dedication” in prose that in Amy Lowell’s day would doubtless have been called “polyphonic.” A rhetoric of pity and anger, it reveals the great complexity of the issues to which the author is alive, is succinct, and shows considerable canniness of appraisal.

Another volume in the “promising” category is David Greenhood’s Poems, et cetera. Like most poets of the Southwest, he is much given to visual imagery, to the evocation of vague moods by sharp perceptions. In “The Life of a Hunter,” a succession of prose paragraphs, the analogy between girl and deer is drawn out deftly, and with freshness. And one is shaken by the ominous speed of his “Aphorism”:

Westward of the road the white cloud rose,

Eastward hove the vulture,

Earthward bowed the high-hung Jew

Introducing culture.

Much of his verse was obviously written at a time when his energies were not yet fully engaged or directed. They have the melancholy of potentialities unemployed, with the result that poetry has for him too many of the associations that go with incompletion. Hence the harsh decision of his envoy:

Singers with sacred nerves,

Mourners for the fallen leaf,

We are writing tonight too many poems

Awake with watchman and thief.

Poets should always be ready to vow such treachery—but as they mature, they should find ever maturer reasons for failing to abide by their vow. In Greenhood’s case, I should imagine that his aphoristic gift, coupled with the adolescent association that poetry has for him, will most likely lead him into a period of analytic prose.

I must end somewhat “unscientifically” by the mere mention of three other books, which are treated summarily not because they are unimportant (I consider all three of importance) but because I have written about them for publication elsewhere, and I should not feel justified in repeating myself here. I refer to Horace Gregory’s Chorus for Survival (which I am reviewing for Poetry) and e. e. cummings’ No Thanks and Kenneth Fearing’s Poems (which I am reviewing for The New Republic). Though sharper in his circumstantial references to the details of his times than Lola Ridge, Gregory resembles her in his turn for metaphysical unification—and I prefer the greater proportion of the critical which Gregory mixes with his sustained musicality. He is wholly at home in the current mode of seeing people statistically, noting about the individual his traits as member of a group. The attitude may show in the depiction of long historic movements—or we may find it in tribal migrations so brief as one evening’s traffic jam, as in the poem beginning

Under the stone I saw them flow,

express Times Square at five o’clock

eyes set in darkness, trampling down

all under, limbs and bodies driven

in crowds, crowds over crowds, the street

exit in starlight and dark air

to empty rooms, to empty arms,

wall paper gardens flowering there,

error and loss upon the walls.

One will find little current verse of greater scope and pliancy than that of Chorus for Survival.

Cummings seems to have got himself into a surprising tangle which keeps him fluctuating between the cryptic and the moony, the comic and the mystically ecstatic—and he frequently grows vindictive in ways that show more fancy and invention than maturity. His satiric gift is crippled by his exaggerated individualism, which a jumble of integrity and pig-headedness has prompted him to intensify in opposition to the current collectivist emphases (he had learned so well the ways of the antinomian that his very aptitudes tend to hold him at this stage). So we find him carrying on a kind of guerilla warfare against all camps, with catch-as-catch-can tactics finally involving him in anti-Semitic elucubrations that do him no credit. But his tendency to snipe at authority in every form helps his output in one notable respect: by stimulating a sense of isolation, it indirectly prods him to stress a compensatory “oneness” with the dramatic events of landscape and season—and some of his purely descriptive poems are excellent of their kind.

Kenneth Fearing, whose book is very accurately located by Edward Dahlberg’s introduction, is almost the exact fit for our needs of the moment. For this reason, like a cartoonist he is limited in the range of his devices—but within this range he attains great suavity (the tonality of plaint and brooding that underlies his slang making for ceremoniousness). And there is no contemporary poet who is neater at noting with ironic corrosion the grotesque injustices of our ailing economic structure, in the “flophouse, workhouse, warehouse, whorehouse, bughouse life of man.”