II

THREE POETS

J.G. Macleod

Without a profound sense of motivations you will, I think,
get no poetry of any great worth. Without an astute sense of
motivations you will get no very <u>diff</u> durable narrative in prose.
The greeks saw motivation as gods. Pugnacity, Cupidity,
deina; potnia, the ineluctable snares, a sense of Order
their father, of Disorder their shaker, Posidon ? antagonist
Poseidon, lure of the sea ?

A silly pseudo-writing has given up real motivation.

The only "/W//" flor flourishing brach of the trade of fistion
is " yellow " detection. For years Europe has felt : a crime
was committed. The feeling did not reach reason, but
novels went that way to keep interest.

At my time of life no man worth weeting will read verse
unless there is something inside it ( even though that something
be only an enormous knowledge of sonorous means ... which one
doesn't find at the moment ª in any young shaver's output.

A false sharge of dulness might lie or be laid
by an impatient reader against all of my subjects. As it
lay against Marianne Moore when she started. You can't
read her verse in a hurry.

Macleod uses too many adjectives. As I recall it

Does critics criticism or th book or trade or the thin
slime of mutually-buttering reviewers and rereviewers expect
the " poetry of this period " to be finally restricted to
that which contains no thought worth a grown man's notice ?
No thought that won't go down like a cocktail ?

At any rate life calls to young life. On isn't
, at 23, an insurance company, guaranteeing the public again
a fellow author's
risk of an author's mental demise.

At 50, one sees the talent, but one also
sees the SAME sort of limitations o' symptoms of limitation:
that have shut off so many young hopes.

The similarity of ALL work by young lad
and gents of 23 strikes one at least as forcibly as their
differences. Miss or M. B in 1933 " reminds one so of"
Miss or Mr M.S. of 1908 that one doesn't see why they sh
go any further than the quite charming ( in 1908 ) but in
1933 or 36 so utterly dessuete Miss or Mr. and so forth.

AND looking for new talent one is, nature
and I believe inevitably, inclined to wonder what they have
we had 't.

And, with equal inevitability, one tends to look
at writers who at least seem to try to "carry on", who at
least appear to be concerned with problems one hadn't onesel.
solved to one's own satisfaction.... even if the new writ
comes no nearer to finding a solution, even if his
effort falls not only short of being even shorter of the
mark than one's own.

Nothing but a parish pimp, or parrochial idiot
can look at ANY art without feeling the enormous extent o
what hasn't YET been done.

You might als almost say, that apart from

2

, every adjective adds something to the expression of
meaning, nevertheless he uses too many adjectives. He is
out of step with his time . It slows the pace at which
any reader can read him.

If I didn't wish to reserve the names of the
two other subjects, I might compare them at once, as to pace.
Marianne's was almost paralytic. It was so definitely a hold up
an arrest of the reading that it took over her few readers
years to get through her work. The work took over two
decades too pass through and out of a cenacle. In opening
"The Ecliptic" I am a little shocked to find that for "Profile
I had unthinkingly chosen the most RAPID poems of EKKK
his Zodiac.

I collate that with a memory of Laurence Einyon
1909 remarking with his limpid sincerity apropos the work
of a younger writer: Oh no! I ed. never do anything like
that, I can never do anything quick.

Somewhere in his chinese criticism or perhaps
it is only a memory of a conversation, I recall his
"Slowness is beauty."

That was a jolt for yankee socker.
Does Macleod use too many adjective, if we suppose his
purpose is pres r precisely to be out of step with
a time that is out of joint, and to hold up the skimmer
and taste, to hold off the skimmer and slider, to insist on
a real reading of him or none.

Does critics criticism or th book r trade or the thin
slime of mutually-buttering reviewers and rereviewers expect
the " poetry of this period " to be finally restricted to
that which contains no thought worth a grown man's notice ?
No thought that won't go down like a cocktail ?