Untitled Book Review

THOSE given to disputations can advance a number of reasons why poets must decline before the advance of science. This makes windy talk, but, as anyone in an editorial chair will swear, verse was never written more prolifically than at present, and with such quantity comes, occasionally, work of quality.

Roy Campbell, the author of Adamastor (Dial Press, $2.50), is, according to Harold Nicolson, ‘one of our most important poets,’and Edith Sitwell speaks of him as ‘a poet who gives me renewed hope for the future of English poetry.’ One remembers the impression made, several years ago, by bis vehement narrative-symbolic poem, The Flaming Terrapin; and certainly there was something genuinely impressive in the foaming energy and wild storm-struck coloring of that work. But it is hardly possible to agree with Mr. Nicolson and Aliss Sitwell in the very high estimate they make or suggest of Mr. Campbell’s genius. To a palate jaded by the mincing elegance and careful neutrality of Georgian poetry—by the ‘tapioca imitating pearls of Edward Marsh’s phrase — the violence, the primitive sweep, the pounding hyperboles and flashing metaphors, the anger, the derisiveness, the bravado of Roy Campbell’s verse are things too refreshing not to provoke gratitude. ‘My life,’ he shouts, ‘has been the enemy of slumber ; and, true enough, he is the last writer in the world who could be charged with cultivating the hypnotic strain. The best poems in this volume — ‘Rounding the Cape, ‘Horses on the Camargue,’ and ‘The Snake’ — have, in a thoroughly traditional way, the power of accomplished but impassioned rhetoric. But Mr. Campbell does not often distinguish betw een real anger and mere angriness, or between color and mere paint; his high-pitched challenges seem too often wordy and wearisome; and both his grandiose imagery and his Marlovian cadences betray too frequently the over-practised touch of the virtuoso. As Edward Marsh also observed, there is little to be said for ‘gravy imitating lava.’

Compared with Mr. Campbell, Sylvia Townsend Warner is no doubt most reprehensibly ‘Georgian,’ Her Opus 7 (Viking Press, $2.00) is dedicated to Arthur Machen, and it was certainly conceived and executed by an admiring contemporary of Walter de la Mare. Probably all the familiar objections could be brought against Miss Warner’s tea-shop whimsicality, her delicate grotesqueries, her English-country-village décor, and her bucolic turns of phrase. But to criticize in such a spirit a narrative poem so spontaneously and unpretentiously executed as this would be both heavy-handed and inept. Miss Warner’s queerish and sometimes bizarre humor is obviously not a literary manner, but a true idiosyncrasy; and she works it for what it is worth and no more.

Opus 7 is the story, related in fluent colloquial couplets to the accompaniment, of comic rhymes, of a village crone, Rebecca, whose old age and low estate are mitigated and even glorified by much gin — a sottish and improvident hag who comes into her own, amid rustic neighbors hitherto censorious or indifferent, when a mysterious and military stranger pays a lavish price for some true old English flowers growing in uncared-for profusion about Rebecca’s cot . The stranger disappears, but the story of his visitation spreads and waxes influential; and Rebecca finds herself the beneficiary of a thriving trade in primroses, daffodils, and mignonette. It is the triumphant close of a long life devoted to the cup, and Rebecca passes her final days amid gin bottles as profuse as heart could wish. She meets her end, indeed, as befits a conscientious toper, in an apocalyptic blaze of alcoholic glory; and both she and her flowers are promptly forgotten after her burial. The poem is not without its ‘metaphysical’ overtones, but the moral, if there is one, is not insisted on; and Miss Warner never relaxes — or only for a few telling lines — the homely irony of her style.

Narrative, too, but in a very different mode from Miss Warner’s, is this first long poem from the pen of Theodore Morrison, The Serpent in the Cloud (Houghton Mifflin, $2.00). Not that Mr. Morrison does not have his ironies too, or that the poem is without humor; but whimsical in any sense it decidedly is not, and the humorous streaks serve only to heighten the general effect of atmospheric luridness. It is a tale told to the accompaniment of almost constantly growling thunder: the title itself signalizes what is the unifying image of the whole, and that is an oak tree seared and whitened by a bolt of lightning. Wanton disaster leaping as if from a thundercloud and shattering the happiness of a whole family — this is the theme of The Serpent in the Cloud; and Mr. Morrison uses his stormy and sinister imagery to fine effect.

The poem is even, if you w ill, like some of Mr. Robinson’s and all of Mr. Jeffers’s, conceived in the terms of a metaphysical melodrama, and if it were rendered in the language or the gait of ordinary prose it would perhaps be merely melodramatic. B-ut you need not read a hundred lines of the poem itself in order to discover how much warmth of feeling and how much severity of thought lie behind it; and certainly the total effect, despite the materials, is not that of sensationalism, but that (if the phrase may be used) of idyllic tragedy. Perhaps the characters are not unfolded with the utmost psychological fullness; perhaps they remain somewhat generalized at the end; perhaps the intellectual burden of the tale is too explicitly embodied. These are minor objections at the best; and they subtract nothing from one’s admiration of a poem written with so much insight, so much rich emotion, so much tine eloquence and linguistic ardor as this. Mr. Morrison begins auspiciously.

NEWTON ARVIN