PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

8934

103

APHRODITE and Other Poems . By Wallace Gould . 8vo. 2½ems

The Macaulay Company. 128 pages. $2.50.

The title poem in Wallace Gould's *Aphrodite and Other Poems*, is unsatisfactory to me. I found it so when it appeared in The American Caravan, 1927, and I find it still the same.

In the Endymion, which follows, my interest begins to pick up. Why? Because I see through the design to more genuine feeling, to more actual signs. And the language is more related to speech - though it is not speech, or course.

“I sat alone 2m
shadly no longer a lover, though often a moonlight night I lie
exposed to your rident leer, a Latmian clown.”

Nothing in the first poem is, to me, quite up to that excellent verbal quality, though the image is most shockingly threadbare. So be it. Perhaps there is too heavy a stress on the lls. It is delightful, nevertheless, to find a man who does care today about the sound of his lines. Perhaps it is this which has sometimes led Gould astray, away from modern speech and modern poetry at its best.

Some of the plainness of modern poetry is, no doubt, precisely what Gould means to avoid. A plainness, however, which when his work first appeared, in The Little Review, endowed it with a vitality which I sometimes miss in his revisions. There is much to be said though for what he is now undertaking.

8934

It is obviously a formal beauty that he is after. I recognize in the artist the necessity for this clarification, but the very solidity of his past work has been for me just its informal sweep.

At best these first two poems are excellent exercises, not so good as some other modern work after the Greek model, nor up to Gould's own earlier, Two Hellenic Heads ( included in this volume ) wherein by his plainness and true feeling he had a great success in bringing life to a classic subject.

It is not until he begins speaking of his cats that I find Gould really serious.

There is included in the book the old romance with which he has been working from the first, his Kennebec ladies, Ann, Rosalind, and Marnie, but I have never been quite clear as to what he means by them. Revised as the three poems now stand, with carefully studied interludes between them, they still give me the feeling that reticence in this case has gone too far. I want to know more! and I am not told. In many places the lines are delightful with the Maine scenery.

The shorter pieces in the latter half of the book are the best of it: about his cats, about an old American goblet (especially fine), about a little singing nigger, about Villon, about anything which Gould has enjoyed. In these he comes up with finely measured praise. Sorrow, regret, resignation, and deriance receding into a constant shuddering world over which poetry alone holds power - his cats are real as the creatures # in Gulliver's Travels and of an equal relationship with the intelligence.