ON THE APPRECIATION OF POETRY

The popular mind clings firmly to the legend that the poetry reader is created by the same divine act as the poet. The result—two classes of people actually read poetry, good poets and bad poets. This applies specifically to the United States where art has no audience. That is, as soon as an individual reaches a level of sensitivity slightly above the average, it assumes in his eyes an importance short only of revealed religion. Thus the beginning of culture is confused with the creative impulse. American traditions of homespun genius or the rough diamond. In two milieus Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg commit similar indiscretions. Amy Lowell, the eclectic, afflicted with too much leisure, Sandburg mistaking a slightly intensified consciousness for the soul of America.

How much are the schools to blame? Here, thanks to a national anonymity, the villain escapes, for who the authors of those Newgate legders known as syllabuses may be, remains dark. Probably the sister-in-law of the state Senator. It is certain that a fine late eighteenth century taste still lingers in secondary school education. All biases aside, it is not inappropriate to ask why Grey and Goldsmith should be considered peculiarly effective poetic fodder for the young.

Universities are not much better. Seventeenth century, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, the material all done up in packages and labelled. It never occurs to anyone to look inside. To balance this, an examination question—paraphrase the following poem. Shades of the State Senator's sister-in-law. Describe a house in terms of a baby carriage, a telephone in terms of a microscope. When Crashaw writes,

Hail sister springs!
Parents of silver-footed rills!
Ever bubbling things!
Thawing crystal! Snowy hills!
Still spending, never spent! I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene:

Heavens thy fair eyes be;
Heavens of falling stars,
'Tis seed time still with thee;
And stars thou sowest whose harvest dares
Promise the earth to countershine
Whatever makes heaven's forehead fine ...

the paraphraser would succeed in recording the fact that Magdalene's eyes are compared to springs and to stars. In fact the most unimportant element in the poem. In some poems a paraphraseable element may not exist. There is no reason why it should. This fact properly digested should prevent the birth of the next question. "What is the poem about?" Whether verses contain a simple sentiment about spring or no discernable

sentiment whatsoever, the values which make them good poetry remain
the same.

And of course we must not forget courses on contemporary poetry in
up-and-coming state universities. Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Edna St.
Vincent Millay and E. A. Robinson.

Population lectures, generally by, second-rate journalists—insin-
cere misinterpretation of good poetry or sincere preaching of the gospel of
bad poetry.

Vachel Lindsay is dead and with him the "higher vaudeville". The
effort to put over Hamlet with colored lights still goes on. The American
public will accept any reasonable attempt to make poetry seem like some-
thing else, to give them the illusion of being exposed to art as long as the
art is unrecognizable. Goethe's Faust in a talkie version. But now the
Congo will have to stand on its own merits as poetry.

A well known journalist and book-reviewer (an Authority) in con-
versation, "I don't really see why publishers get out books of verse. They
only sell a few hundred copies." Yet some anthologies seem to be com-
mercial propositions. Certified Art, chosen by Authorities, may repose on
library tables, unread.

It is astonishing how little of the contemporary criticism of poetry is
actually written from an artistic point of view. Even at this date the Amer-
ican critic hardly dares to be a critic. He feels it necessary to profess sales-
manship, religion, philosophy, or social theory. It is commonly believed that
in these parlous times poetry should be drafted for active duty, the nature
of this duty depending on the panacea in which the critic is most involved.
Objectively, however, it does not seem as if a mixing of offices would
clarify what is generally admitted as a time of mental and spiritual confu-
sion. Even in the case of a particularly severe conflagration a skilled violin-
ist is not called upon to turn his instrument into a fire-siren.

The wealthy amateur takes lessons in painting in order to feel less
naive in the presence of his own collection. It is generally conceded that
to enjoy the more complicated forms of music considerable exposure of the
ears must take place. Why must poetry be surrounded by a sentimental
mist? The same training of the senses is necessary as for other arts. Tech-
nical exercise would help (ear training, NOT practise in expressing one's
soul).

There will never be an American culture until Americans are willing
to submit to the discipline OF APPRECIATION. That concentration and
a slight mental effort will render the capacities for enjoyment more subtle
and that this DOESN'T COST ANYTHING is a concept foreign to the
native mind. Whether the pioneers or the puritans are to blame, the movie
concept of pleasure by the mile and the ton, the orchid-champagne-force-
lain-silver-plated dream still reigns triumphant. The increasing number of
poets (good and bad) does not signify the dawn of anything so long as
they are each other's only readers.

H. R. H.

HARVEY N. FOSTER

DEAD MEDITATION

When spring
waters run

to the wave
and

the grey-green
glass folds

with white spray
salt; and dry

sand is dust
dry from winter

and singing
birds release

a flight
of bells in hard

gaiety, o then
is time

connective and
body and sun

meet in blue
silence

with cautious
contemplation:

people mate
or here is

and only 'time
to create' and

murderous spring
comes whis-

pering in wind
and rain.

DAVID CORNEL DEJONG

FEAST FOR CHILDREN

They were the old who saw the wonder yellowed
and peered along the adaged beards
upon this glad feast given
amid the pinkish candles.
Their laughter rings—before the word is said,
before the eyelids throw the old
remembered aberrations and the lips
cajole their indentation within the
vague, historic pates—the laughter peels,
the children kiss; the innocent are driven
to slaughter, then sleazy on their hazy sandals
the wizened sidle on and grin their moldy heads.

NEW MONTH

This time the wind, and so a rampant hour
Swings dangling with the vine—see, greyed the earth—
The mouth of tulips gasp upon the shower,
All higher song is quelling down to mirth.

This is no time to tirade by
Come daughter lay the hand on laughter,
The weed-seed drifts to white the sky
And stalks the sloven furrows after.

The red clock on the bronze time hedges many
Long shouts along the air, he stands, he cranes,
He hollows deeper loneliness than any
Unblanching day against the window panes.

Is there no height, no april bleak
To sponge this wriggling blue to marble,
A wordless stone whereto the creak
Of seasons comes and autumn warble?

J. V. CUNNINGHAM

By vision of contrasted stars
eyeless as indeterminate night,
remember him who prayed you rest.

And pray for him who in his rest
worried each facet of our stars;
wearied; went over to the night;

lay quiet, while material night
shivered in lightening day to rest.
He slept among appointed stars.

HARRY ROSKOLENKIER

FUNERAL

So they've buried him without music:
carefully the mourners picked their steps
among the low grass:
their rubber heels, silence;
in this realm, not all silence;
a bird whistled—
no, no wind blew.

They left in speeding cars:
a thousand people mourned; O more
than that,
looked at the hole,
at the worms crawling . . .

Who is this in the cool—
read him, of him
—between a book's pages, too carefully portrayed;
most carefully—but not he
of the cool—:

There are better tales—
without music, this is not a cinema, but like—
They who inherit
from the cool—
bullet, hand and mind
of another gangster—
have warm hearts.

HECTOR RELLA

SUNDAY MORNING

(For D. M.)

salvation army band
faintly and far and further
down the tunnel of the street
the exalted drum shakes awake
the cluttered canal
the hasty resurrection of a lily
explodes brightly and men are afraid
of the sudden splendour: they say
'let us by no means lift any dust
(for there was a time, another time)
'let us by all means keep the house quiet—
'that's my uncle and this is my aunt
'far away and long ago
'they died and were quietly covered with snow.'

But the secret is out and the parlour is filled
(I told you not to open the door)
what they drank and where they swilled
takes Time to tell who knew them well
they rip the velvet and piss on the straw
how can Time tell you what we saw?
that scales the amplitude of human virtue—
the fire revealed the infinite variety
upward from a morass of groans
rose harmonious drops of love
emitting 'hallelujah hallelujah'—
old tapisserie stinks, the mirror is broken

Now I however shall dare
the dark place of Sunday—
no pseudomartyr I being able to say
your breasts are very proximate, also very mild stars
and I shall recapture somewhat the order
the music the light
of the evangelized imagination
(according as the confusion will allow)
because you have assuaged
my tumult
with your hair
the storm of your hair upon my storm
where it floats pungently seaweed

Yes
I shall enter again the furtive place
I suppose the forever phrase is 'selva oscura'—
time's intertwined branches, no music of leaves
and so goddamned many sentieri—
and I shall play better
the problem of color and sound and mysterious affection
knowing should I look backward
should I feel suddenly lost
should I turn suddenly dark
would be your body
by the light of a lamp
high up and safe
and I would climb by your voice to your mouth

Therefore I salute you
halflost I salute you
I thank you for the solid house
on the edge of the endless space
where an Unknown Bird with enormous wings
moves the whole air and silently sings

H. R. HAYS

ANCHORAGE

come
we shall anchor the floating earth
in the steel ring
of a poem larger than space
bracing
knee and thigh
and the image that trembles
knotting speed in a rope of smoke
and no
half-fledged angels

for
the billboards wear Sunday smiles
and a new emergence
demands

without waiting
and we cannot hide
or disguise ourselves as acrobats
when the landscape passes rapidly as a train
or unexpected laughter
and dew assaults the positive grass

PAUL EATON REEVE

ODE FOR FLY, JR.

You are all that you would like to be,
to me.

When I look at you, I see
a face that is at once noble,
impressive, handsome, and
generally perfect.

It is a face that masks a spirit
of indomitable mastery
and ruthless will,
tender as flowers, yet
sharp and firm.

It is a face to conjure with,
resonant with might.
It is a face.

Your kingdom extends beyond this world:
where the air is not so breathable or thick as here,
submerged in adoration, lake of cakes
and stricken worshippers
are the ruins of your failures.

Your eyes survey the scene with flashing grace,
at a glance taking all in.

Observe these faces,
a continuous multitude of myopic flies,
clawing in crevices in your armor impenetrable.
Not knowing that your armor was impenetrable,
you were deluded by hallucinations;
illusions composed your brain: you believed
that certain of this multitude were stroking with their feelers
and wise antennae, the reasons why
you could not be as you would be.

They have no substance. Pity them, the lost
and pallid deluded.

I. A. RICHARDS' THEORY OF POETRY

H. B. PARKES

I. A. Richards lectures on English literature at Cambridge, England, and recently held the Norton professorship at Cambridge, Mass. His influence, which is particularly marked in those who have studied under him, is due, perhaps, less to his writings than to his personality. His study of what hinders the average reader from appreciating poetry in "PRACTICAL CRITICISM", is an admirable, if not very important, piece of field-work. He also deserves credit for an unusually clear understanding of how life has been impoverished by the disappearance of religion. But the main drift of his argument, in "THE FOUNDATIONS OF AESTHETICS", "PRINCIPLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM", and "SCIENCE AND POETRY", is that poetry should be considered not as poetry but as a substitute for religious beliefs. His critical theory, if applied correctly (as Richards himself does not apply it—his practise is better than his theory), can only have the most harmful effect on appreciation.

Richard compares the mind to a very complex system of delicately poised balances or magnetic needles. "Every situation we come into disturbs some of these balances to some degree", and they in turn affect some or all of the remainder. These balances or needles are our interests, and "the wagglings which ensue as the system rearranges itself are our responses, the impulses through which we seek to meet the need."

Reading a poem, like any other experience, causes movements within the mental system. It arouses in us "emotions and attitudes. Emotions are what the reaction, with its reverberations in bodily changes, feels like. Attitudes are the impulses towards one kind of behavior or another which are set ready by the response." These emotions and attitudes are similar, if we understand the poem rightly, to the emotions and attitudes which made up the poet's experience.

What we desire most is "the fullest, keenest, most active and completest kind of life",—a life which "brings into play as many as possible of the positive interests", in such a way that they "remain in play with as little conflict among themselves as possible." Goodness is therefore a state of equilibrium within the mental system, and "the worth of any experience is a matter of the degree to which the mind, through this experience, attains a complete equilibrium." The best equilibrium is that which is obtained not by suppressing some of our conflicting impulses but by adjusting all of them to each other, so that we achieve a moral order which "brings into play all our faculties."

Moral order was formerly attained through religious beliefs. Religious beliefs were accepted as statements of fact, but in reality they were mere-

ly pseudo-statements, i.e. statements to be judged not by their truth or falsity but by their "effect in releasing or organizing our impulses and attitudes." Modern science has made these religious beliefs impossible, and we must therefore find pseudo-statements of some other kind with which to achieve mental equilibrium.

This is the function of poetry. Poetry also consists of pseudo-statements but does not attempt to pass them off as statements of fact. A poet is one who has achieved equilibrium "for a brief while, for a particular phase of experience", and poetry is a record of such experiences. A poem sets in motion various impulses in the mind of the reader and eventually they swing into a state of equilibrium similar to that achieved by the poet. "The words will reproduce in his mind a similar play of interests putting him for a while into a similar situation and leading to the same response." It follows, therefore, that by reading poetry we can attain to a moral ordering of our impulses similar to that formerly reached through an acceptance of religious beliefs.

According to this theory there are two stages in the appreciation of a poem. First, the experience is communicated; we read the poem so as to make "all its minute particulars as intimately and as fully present to our minds as we can contrive—no general description of it but the very experience itself present as a living pulse in our biographies." And then, secondly, we must choose whether the experience helps or harms our attaining of mental equilibrium. "The personality stands balanced between the particular experience which is the realized poem and the whole fabric of the past experience and developed habits of mind. What is being settled is whether this new experience can or cannot be taken into the fabric with advantage. Would the fabric afterwards be better or worse?" "There comes a point in all criticism where a sheer choice has to be made without the support of any argument, principles, or general rules."

Richards considers the mind as a piece of machinery and has little use for such concepts as will, reason, and consciousness; he dismisses all pre-scientific notions of psychology with much contempt. Properly to criticize his theories would be to criticize the whole mechanistic view of human nature. A significant inconsistency can, however, be detected within the terms of his argument.

We are left in doubt as to whether the condition of equilibrium which he postulates as the ideal for human being is one of harmonious activity or of a suspension of activity. Many of his statements imply the latter. He says, for example, that "in equilibrium, there is no tendency to action, and many concert-goers must have realized the impropriety of the view that action is the proper outcome of aesthetic appreciation . . . when works of art produce such action, or conditions which lead to action, they have either not completely fulfilled their function or would in the view of equilibrium here being considered be called not "beautiful" but "stimulative"." The good man, therefore, is a contemplative who has no desire for activity; his impulses, instead of expressing themselves in action, are satisfied in artistic appreciation; good art is cathartic and static. This view would have curious consequences: the good man by Richards' psychology would be a motionless machine instead of a machine in activity. The traditional reason for a cessation from activity was to set free the higher parts of the soul for religious contemplation; but to Richards the soul has no

higher parts and there is no religion to provide objects for contemplation.

Richards, however, though he speaks approvingly of Confucius, obviously means something quite different. The good life, to him, is a life of harmonious activity. "What is good or valuable" he says, "is the exercise of impulses and the satisfaction of their appetencies. When we say that anything is good we mean that it satisfies, and by a good experience we mean one in which the impulses which make it are fulfilled and successful, adding as a necessary qualification that their exercise and satisfaction shall not interfere in any way with more important impulses." "The artist is concerned with the record and perpetuation of the experiences which seem to him most worth having . . . . His experiences, those at least which give value to his work, represent conciliations of impulses which in most minds are still confused, intertrammelled and conflicting . . . . The value of what he has accomplished is found always in a more perfect organization which makes more of the possibilities of response and activity available." The reason why art does not immediately stimulate to action is not that it satisfies impulses without action but merely that "the full appropriate situation for action is not present"; it leaves instead a "readiness for action" which will recur when the situation repeats itself in real life.

In other words, the purpose of art is to promote good activity. We have once more the moral criterion, and in a peculiarly vicious form, since, as Richards says in the passage already quoted, it must be applied independently by each individual "without the support of any arguments, principles, or general rules."

We have only to consider a few examples to see what havoc such a theory, properly applied, would make of literary appreciation. To what extent, for example would harmonious activity be increased by a reading of Proust, whose view of life is that of an invalid bathing himself in heterogeneous memories, bound together not by logical or practically useful connections but by accidental associations? Or how would the individual be improved by infecting himself with the cosmic despair of "King Lear" or with the nostalgic pessimism of the best nineteenth century poets or with Joyce's sense of universal chaos and frustration? A poem would be judged not by its fidelity to the experience which it recorded, but by the moral value of that experience. Moreover, each individual, having his own unique "developed habits of mind", would judge a poem on grounds peculiar to himself, and all argument would be impossible. To some (since by Richards' theory the attitudes of religion should be preserved, even though the beliefs connected with them have lost their status) the writings of St. Teresa or of Richard Rolle of Hampole would be better than Homer or Shakespeare, others might prefer the healthy optimism of Whitman or of "The Canticle of The Sun".

Richards himself, however, is a better critic than his theories would indicate; he is not above liking poetry as poetry, though he sometimes conceals the fact under the verbiage of psychology. He likes, for example, the poetry of T. S. Eliot. "Some readers," he says, "find in his poetry not only a clearer, fuller realization of their plight, the plight of a whole generation, than they find elsewhere, but also through the very energies set free in that realization a return of the saving passion." The second part of this sentence sounds suspiciously like nonsense; Richards is trying to re-

concile his appreciation of Eliot's poetry with his critical theories. A read-
ing of "The Waste Land", he says, will promote good activity. It need
hardly be said that readers who find "The Waste Land" a moral stimu-
lant are certainly hard to find. If, however, we turn our attention to
Richards' first reason for appreciating Eliot, we find suggested a quite dif-
ferent and much truer theory of poetry: "The Waste Land", according to
Richards, records a state of mind. That state of mind is not morally good;
it happens, however, to be widespread and unavoidable, and it is therefore
significant. Poetry, we may say, records significant states of mind; some
may be morally good, and others more or less harmful, but that has no re-
levance in criticism. Good poetry does not cause us to respond to situations
with any particular kind of activity; poetry which has such consequences
is pornographic or sentimental. Poetry is a conscious and deliberate re-
cording of emotions and attitudes; the reader, by understanding a poem,
becomes conscious of the state of mind recorded in it. What moral con-
sequences may follow indirectly from the reading of a poem is entirely the
reader's affair, and the author cannot be blamed for them; but since the
function of poetry is to broaden the range of consciousness, its moral ef-
fect cannot normally be anything but good, even when it describes patho-
logical or criminal experiences.

Poetry, moreover, which records states of mind with which the reader
is wholly unfamiliar, cannot communicate them completely. In so far as
it deals with experiences which are common to human beings in general,
or can translate the unusual into terms of the more common, it can be
appreciated. But in reading works which describe very abnormal states of
mind, we can become conscious only in a very vague way of the kind of ex-
perience concerned. Richards believes that the highest human experiences
can be shared through artistic appreciation; but nobody can wholly understand
the "Paradiso" or the last quartets of Beethoven until he has himself, by
some process of moral or emotional development, arrived at something simi-
lar. Dante or Beethoven may guide us towards such a state of mind, but
poetry alone cannot save our souls.

Such a conception of poetry is perhaps inconsistent with mechanistic
psychology; it implies that man has a consciousness with which he can con-
template emotions, his own and other peoples, and that an extension of
the range of consciousness is good. But metaphysical implications are in-
evitable in any critical method. What is important is to judge poetry as
poetry and not to introduce irrelevant philosophical, ethical or religious cri-
teria. A poem is good when the writer records a genuinely felt experience
and not a second hand idea masquerading as an experience, and when he
has sufficient mastery of the language to record it successfully.

CLASSICIST AND REGIONALIST

H. R. HAYS

YVOR WINTERS

I.

Yvor Winters' new pamphlet of poems is a sharp disappointment.
Formerly an excellent imagist poet, in the last years he has been making the
gesture of a return to traditional meters with disastrous results. The gap
between the following from THE PROOF:

SONG OF THE TREES

Belief is blind! Bees scream!
Gongs! Thringed with lights!
And I take
into light, hold light,
in light I live I,
pooled and broken here,
to watch, to wake above you.
Sun,
no seeming but savage
simplicity, breaks running
for an eon, stops, shuddering, here.

and such banalities as this

"Still I shall meet you on the verge of dust
And know you as a faithful vestige must.
And in commemoration of our lust,
May our heirs seal us in a single urn,
A single spirit never to return.

in his last volume is amazing. Mr. Winters is a critic of distinction. It
should be possible to find in his analytical thinking some explanation for
this rejection of the Pound quantitative line which he had mastered in favor
of thumping heroic coplets which are, too often, only doggerel in his
hands.

His work is worth examining for several reasons. He is one of the
few younger critics who has written seriously about contemporary poetry.
Having issued several numbers of a little review, THE GYROSCOPE,
he may be said to stand for a California group, an instance of a kind of
regional renaissance noticeable in several quarters since the war.

Finally, his reactionary tendencies are typical of a number of younger
poet-critics who, while differing on sectarian matters, nevertheless have
much in common with the Humanists of the Babbitt-More generation in
that they mix aesthetics, ethics and philosophy.

"Man comes from the earth and returns to the earth and makes of the interim what he can of his unaided powers" (Gyroscope, Nov., 1929) says Mr. Winters, flatly disclaiming any religious authority for his system of values. Invoking Aristotle, we come to the conclusion that "The basis of evil is in emotion; good rests in the power of rational selection in action, as a preliminary to which the emotion in any situation must be as far as possible eliminated, and, in so far as it cannot be eliminated, understood." (Gyroscope, Nov., 1929). And, "The end is a controlled and harmonious life." (Gyroscope, Nov., 1929). From this we arrive at the definition of the poet's task. "To extend as far as possible human consciousness and to organize the facts of life into a new and more dynamic synthesis." (Third American Caravan). "But the artist who can feel the full horror (of modern thought), organize it into a dynamic attitude or state of mind, asserting by that act his own life and the strength and value of his own life, and who can leave that state of mind completed behind him for others to enter, has performed the greatest spiritual service that can be performed." (Third American Caravan). This describes very well Mr. Winters' own earlier work but it is presumption on his part to assert that it is the highest poetic attainment. It is obviously neither Aristotle or any other philosopher to whom he is indebted for this point of view but rather his own temperament. The assumption that the emotions are wholly bad and the intellect wholly good is controversial enough but when it becomes evident from the above quotations that the only emotion with which Mr. Winters is concerned is fear and that he proposes an intellectual battle with fear as the proper activity for the poet, the dangers of self rationalization are plain. The hundred of "expansive emotions" or "self-indulgence" which Mr. Winters shares with the older humanists is seemingly the result of a temperamental incapacity to feel them. An incapacity to feel life intuitively, to become a part of it; always shrinking in terror, always piling up the barriers of the mind, this is the modern puritan with Intellect in place of God. Carlos Williams (whom Mr. Winter professes to admire) writes "The dreadful and curious thing is that men, despoiled and having nothing, must long for that which they have not and so, out of the intensity of their emptiness imagining they are full, deceive themselves and all the despoiled of the world into their sorry beliefs. It is the spirit that existing nowhere in them is forced into their dreams. The Pilgrims, they, the seed, instead of growing, looking back at the world and damning its perfections praised a zero in themselves." (In The American Grain) They are latter day puritans who with their god of Reason commandeer the arts to serve in the place of their lost religion and continue to confuse aesthetics with their own moral problems.

Winters finds his attitude best exemplified in Baudelaire (strange master for a would be classicist) and all poetic attitudes not approximating that of Baudelaire are automatically ranked as inferior. Irony, humor, ecstacy, or delight are damned regardless of the high degree of excellence and rightness of the equilibrium which they create in the work of other poets. "Technique, so understood not only has a place in the moral system, it is the outer boundary of consciousness. "Thus the outward manifestation of the intellectual (moral) bulwark against terror is the poet's technique. Indeed Mr. Winters states "I should differ from such writers as Messrs. Babitt, More and Foester, in preferring if forced to the choice, to judge a man's ethics by his poetry rather than his poetry by his ethics." (Gyroscope) On the other hand "It is worth noting that the poetry of such a man say, as Rochester (who in this is typical of his age) displays a mastery of

an extremely narrow range of experience, and that his moral brutality falls almost wholly in those regions (nearly everything except worldly manners) with which his poetry fails to deal." (Critique of Humanism) "in reading him he is aware that he is a wholly sound and beautiful poet." Which makes it clear that Winters in renouncing religion renounced also moral criteria in the usual sense, but creates a wholly new set of morals of the Intellect, such as rejection of the "emotional receptivism of Mr. Eliot and Mr. Macleish", "all doctrines of religious expansionism", "All doctrines of humanitarianism", "all doctrines which advocate that the poet express his country (Whitman-Rousseauism) or his time (Dadaism and allied humanities) since these are merely extensions of nature worship", "the delirium of data of the realists as well as the delirium in vacuo of the superrealists since both negate all principles of judgment, discrimination and organization and are the product of a passive and receptive state of mind." (Gyroscope, May, 1929) After this grand renunciation one's bewilderment increases. Mr. Winters has instinctive good taste and considerable insight into structure. His likes and dislikes are often sound but his poetic program is an extraordinary vacuum. Poetry after all has to be about something and if all emotions except terror are to be eschewed as deadly, if a receptive state of mind is sinful how is the writer to obtain fresh data for judging, discriminating and organizing? How is a new dynamic synthesis to be arrived at; how is the consciousness to be extended? As usual Mr. Winters allows in the concrete what he condemns in the abstract. "Let me reiterate, however, that I do not wish to deny the desirability of extending the limits of the consciousness and adding to it, even into regions previously unexplored—I demand only that that the poet keep what he started with and add to it."

Mr. Winters' confusion comes from the fact that he attempts to raise a process to the dignity of the absolute. The functioning of the intellect is needful in any work of art but it is not necessarily holy. At present lacking religion one might as well admit that values are subjective and avoid Mr. Winters' boy-stood-on-the-burning-deck heroism and attempted moral mathematics. Better no God than the inner check. Poetry is a legitimate activity in itself quite distinct from philosophy and practical conduct. Even St. Thomas, to whom Mr. Winters refers occasionally, according to his modern spokesman, Jacque Maritain, acknowledges this. "L'Art qui rectifie le Faire and non l'Agir, se tient donc en dehors de la ligne humaine, il a une fin, des regles, des valeurs, qui ne sont pas celles de l'homme, mais cela de l'oeuvre a produire. Cette oeuvre est tout pour l'Art, il n'y a pour lui qu'une loi—les exigences et le bien de l'oeuvre." (Art et Scholastique)

The insistence on intellectual discipline as the only virtue, which Mr. Winters shares with other classicists, since it is actually not supported by any system of values tends to become harmful as it encourages renunciation, snobbishness and superficiality. Great art always has its roots in its time however much it may transcend it. Mr. Winters' withdrawal, his adoption of the heroic couplet (a mathematical approach to metrics) the inferior quality of his last book is sufficient warning of the dangers of the new classicism. Mr. Winters was a good poet while still a Pound-imagist, but his own philosophy carries in it the seeds of dissolution.

THE JOURNEY—Dragon Press, Ithaca, New York, 1931. $1.50.

## II.
ALLEN TATE

With Allen Tate we again traverse some of the ground trodden by Yvor Winters. Mr. Tate is also a poet-critic, a regionalist and a believer in the virtues of "reason" if one is to judge from the quotation on the title page of his book. His critical writing is, however, extremely cautious. He has wisely rejected the attempt to make a religion of literature in his analyses of Yvor Winters and the older humanists but nearly always refrains from committing himself to any positive opinion as to the nature and function of poetry. In fact it becomes increasingly difficult (in view of the lack of concrete observations) to discover the grounds on which his critical reputation is founded. In a survey of recent poetry (Bookman, Jan., 1929) he contents himself with pointing out the superficiality of the romantic revival of the early twenties as exemplified in such facile emotionals as Sandburg and Amy Lowell and the breakdown of the attempt to create a unified American attitude in poetry. Further he does not go than to indicate the rise of younger regional artists whose work he approves.

In an attack on Yvor Winters (Sewanee Review, April-June, 1930) one discovers the following statement: "But if the poet is complex enough, if he can no longer conceal the complexity of the situation under practical observation, he will exhibit the practical formula which is supposed to cover it, in actual disintegration, like Leopardi; or likely Shelley, he will construct a new version in which the explicit formula is omitted. In either case, the frustrated situation is too complex to be contained in a single rule or a single clause. He presents the situation as BEING, and for the moment at any rate no longer tries to dominate it in action. It is this which gives great poetry its serenity and detachment, and by this we mean, if the term have any meaning, Classicism."

For, by frustration I do not mean any of the varieties of defeatism now in fashion, nor a merely psychological frustration upon which so much modern poetry founders. A poetry based on this kind of frustration, or upon its obverse a too easy sense of security, which we find in poets like Whitman and Sandburg—is mere provincialism, and hangs itself upon its own special plea."

Objecting to Winters' contention that poetry deals with a residue of emotion which has not been successfully dispelled from a situation, he adds, "Formulas are the very materials of poetry. It deals with the breakup of them all when they are pushed too far. And the technique for dealing with the failure of all our special recipes, in the end, is art. An ultimate formula does not stop with directions how to become a good citizen or with Whitman's advice as to the best way to subdue a continent. These are not sufficiently searching, not deep enough. Poetry at its greatest confesses that all practical solutions to the religious problem, which on that plane becomes the moral problem, have been tried in vain."

These passages, which are rather typical, are a fair field for exegesis. If they mean that poetry, on the one hand, must not sink into blind emotionalism without direction and, on the other, must avoid the assumption of an active philosophical or religious role but should occupy itself with stating a problem, this is not so startling that it could not be said simply.

It is difficult to understand the value of such abstract verbiage, such staggering about between criticism and philosophy.

Mr. Tate's poetry, at its worst displays the same tendencies.

"But you have lived as if to vindicate
Once more our slavery to circumstance
Not by contempt of that prescriptive fate
But in your bearing towards its hour of chance,
Which is in part so humble and so proud
You'll think but little of it in your shroud."

And again

"For evil done these last two centuries
We fulminate in exile from our earth
Aged exclusions of blood memories
Those superstitions of explosive birth,
Until there'll be of us not anything
But gentle death, who is confusion's king."

Now this is precisely the kind of blurring of language, this making of imprecise words more imprecise which began in the eighteenth century and rotted the substance of poetry during the nineteenth until the revolt of the imagists temporarily checked its ravages. The scattered critical writings of Ezra Pound (not yet properly appreciated) are calculated to exterminate it.

But it is unjust to speak of Mr. Tate's poetry only in terms of its defects. His is a religious nature troubled by the sad case of religion in contemporary civilization.

"For miracles are faint,
And resurrection is our weakest clause of religion."

Like Eliot and the seventeenth century poets his mood is nostalgic and his preoccupation death. Technically he is inferior to both. One is seldom struck by the rightness of word choice while his meters are often harsh and clumsy. This is especially noticeable in the sonnets. On the other hand—

"The singular screech-owl's bright
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry."

atones for much rhetoric and the poem MESSAGE FROM ABROAD in which he catches the Eliot cadence is wholly satisfying. Especially the stanzas—

"Wanderers to the east, wanderers west:
I followed the cold northern track
And the sleet sprinkled sea;
The dim foam mounted
The depths of the night,
Absolute, steady sea.

With dawn came the gull to the crest
Stared at the spray fell asleep
Over the picked bones the white face
Of the leaning man drowned deep . . . "

YALE

His talent, though minor, is distinctive. He is most successful when he is concrete or metaphysical in the manner of Donne but it seems likely that his poetry would benefit if some of the energy expended on philosophical criticism were employed in the study of technique.

Taken together, the work of these two poets shows that spirituality cannot arise parthenogenetically. The reaction again the naive emotionalism of the twentieth century American Renaissance is, of course well-founded. Precision in thinking, a rigorous scrutiny of emotion is in order, but a return to the old errors or a fuzzy use of vague terms is neither a gain in spirituality nor in profundity. Imagism laid bare spiritual nakedness of the modern man. It was at least honest in coming to grips with experience. The new intellectualism tends to sacrifice this gain while (in the case of Mr. Tate and Mr. Winters) offering nothing valuable in return.

POEMS 1928-1931 ALLEN TATE—Scribner's—1932. $2.00.

THE KNIFE OF THE TIMES and Other Stories by William Carlos Williams, (Dragon Press). $1.50.

These reminiscences and brief naturalistic narratives rise at their best to the economy and evocative clarity of Flaubert, De Maupassant, and the Joyce of Dubliners. If when they drop, it is, in all but the moralizing, to the plane of True Stories, that is because True Stories are in the same tradition. In any event, these are straight accounts; the tales go ahead with their information, their details bare of those crackling renderings of sensation which innervate Dr. Williams' poetry and some of his other prose; nor are there pauses for such interjections of associations and of arguments about aesthetics and the nature of things which in JANUARY, etc. create questions about W's ideas of form. I guess W means in these stories to present the people of his surroundings as they live apart from him, while in works like JANUARY he wishes us to see himself and his mind.

A curious thing about THE KNIFE OF THE TIMES is that though the stories cannot be said to improve as one goes on through the book, yet one's interest in them increases. This may be due to the fact that the reader becomes progressively aware of a narrator who is describing simply and without extreme effort to achieve the tension of art events which actually happened or which might have happened to people who attract him because he considers them to be after all the real people of his world and the most important realities external to himself. They live near him, they are the people of his county, sometimes he gets out of bed to treat them medically, so quite honestly, in the plainest language he can use, he tells about them . . . This language is rarely the direct idiom of the street; it is the mingled discourse of the decent but not over-polite educated American, with its conciliation of dialects and its chance precisions. At random—

"I don't know what we did then but I remember we crossed over 14th St. just opposite Tammany Hall and started sauntering back on the other side."

The word 'sauntering' is the key to a merger of idioms. Or this rather marvellous combination—

"He had had a Hungarian girl who was scared as hell of the knife under his care with a strangulated hernia.

The Colored Girls of Passenack and Old Doc River are brisk, clear descriptions of local types. In a Visit to the Fair and Hands Across the Sea, W succeeds in noting and isolating what is perhaps the most banal stage of an emotion, the period in which it not only fails to instigate action but is not even recognizable as a feeling, when it is merely the occasion for preferring commonplace conversation with one person rather than with another. Dr. William does not lead his patients out of their emotional paraplegia, and the meaningless relation thus emerges inertly against a background of indefinite possibility.

The Sailor's Son is quite successful in form, and Old Doc Rivers and An Old Time Raid contain interesting anecdotes.

HAROLD ROSENBERG

THE DARK LAND, K. T. Young. Dragon Press, Ithaca, N. Y. $1.00.

Throughout the twenty-three poems that go to make up this second book of Miss Young's there is an aloof detachment and quietitude. This grave tone however, is not one of illumination, but rather, of an opaque density.

Her work resolves itself into single poetic lines, a quantitative line which has a monotonous effect except in very few poems. This 'poetic' line, of undoubtedly individuality, stemming from the 'symbolists' through Eliot is reminiscent of the unendingness and unprecision of the 'poetry' of Amy Lowell. Lines such as:

> And today the flowers died in the blue bowls,
> And I sent them away in an ash-can painted silver.

Rain in August and the silver dust is splashed upon the pave
Rain on the fruit stalls, on the grape-man on the orange,

tend toward a flowery poeticism of statement and a puerile romanticism. Her declaration of 'things seen' 'things done' in a manufactured (stylized?) 'poetic' manner mars the detached tension of the poems as a whole.

It is of interest to compare the work of Miss Young with that of Marianne Moore. Miss Moore builds her phrases from words, and each word in the phrase has a complete value and each word is surgically shining and bright. Miss Young has completely lost sight of the precision and value of the 'word': her 'words' are groups of words which bring about a softness and a slurring of the single word into the next word, consequently her poetry resolves into line after line of easy-flowing words carrying ambigous connotations.

There are occasional echoes

> And yesterday M. Milhaud came down into the basement
> With sunlight on his shoulders
> And dust in the worn spots and his ears very red:
> It is snug and black here in winter
> Like an adder's hole ...

which is reminiscent of Eliot's, "I read, much of the night, and go South in the winter.": and sentimentality

Little ones drag their dolls of what names
(What names, little mothers?)

that seem to indicate a lack of critical perception in Miss Young. At her best, Cafe Scene at Sunset, there is a gradual sharpening and tightening of her line with a resulting ecstatic moment; at her worst, (as example) The Days go Over Like a Flock of Birds, there is a 'surrealiste' tendency and an almost complete indifference as to a unified comprehensibility.

HARVEY N. FOSTER