Three American Poets

NATIONALISM has all but disrupted the nations; love of country, not in an abstract or political sense, but piety and passion toward the very land and people of one’s inheritance, remains an unassailable prerogative of human feeling. Such love has formed a natural theme of poetry; but it does not often speak in American verse to-day with conviction or merit. Tl sought to speak in the ’Invocation of Mr. Benét s John Browns Body; it speaks much more brilliantly and successfully in Archibald MacLeish’s Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City (John Day Pamphlets, 25c). The frescoes may prove ephemeral, mere vers d‘occasion in the long glance of time; so much the greater is the pleasure of reading and honoring them now, when they are alive to the moment, when the truth and rightness of the perceptions they express is none the less genuine, however their idiom and their allusions may be impaired by time.

In his Frescoes, Mr. MacLeish has matched the brilliant wit, the shrewd condensation, the suggestive power found in such contemporaries as Pound and Eliot, avoiding the obscurity and eccentricity that perplex their work; and he has assimilated what he finds apt in others without disturbance to his sustained and peculiar metrical tone. Whatever Mr. MacLoish has accomplished hitherto, the Frescoes suggest that he has reached a distinct point of development from which he may be expected to make far-reaching advances.

The qualities to be expected of a blank-verse narrative by Edwin Arlington Robinson are now too well known to allow either surprise or novelty a place in the reading, unless Mr. Robinson should make a departure from his accustomed methods. No such departure distinguishes Talifer (Macmillan, $1.75), Again we find a story turning upon a crisis in human character and in the mutual relations of a little knot of people; again we find a style composed partly of quibbling, partly of a dry, thin, cicada-like music, partly of witty

and epigrammatic turns of irony and perception. The reader will search the pages very nearly in vain for the indescribable but very recognizable richness and magic of phraseology that we think of as present in the truest poetry. But Talifer, if not very notable as a poem, is livelier, more entertaining, more penetrating in characterization, than the recent narratives which Mr. Robinson has been publishing with regularity. It is considerably superior in point of pure interest to Cavender’s House or The Glory of the Nightingales. The central situation is capital. Talifer, imposing physically, a local aristocrat by inheritance and temperament, with the appearance of Olympian infallibility in judgment and morals and a pride that his modesty seeks in vain to deprecate, marches up to his fiancée with all the dignity of an old-fashioned British square doing its duty under fire, and tells her that for honor’s sake, and before it is ’too late,’ he must break the engagement on behalf of another woman with whom he has found ’Peace.’ The other woman, Karen, is by way of being a bluestocking,

Dr. Quick, a hard-drinking, vagabondish, kind-hearted humorist who by the aid of circumstance reveals to Talifer his egregiousness and restores the proper sway of sweetness and light all around, must also be ranked among Mr. Robinson’s most amusing and characteristic inventions. Talifer would make a more lasting impression if the dénouement were not brought about too easily; it wants climax; and the sunshine and universal amiability with which it concludes are more generous than even an age said to be desperately in need of optimism may require.

The phenomenal gifts of Robinson Jeffers have received acknowledgment. They are gifts of phrasing and of erratic, electric perception; expressions and thoughts, often instinct with purest imagination and poetry, flash like summer lightning across the confused and spectral murk which appears to be his accustomed atmosphere. Carlyle, was it not, said that Napoleon had words like Austerlitz battles, thinking, perhaps, of their intelligence and decisiveness. Mr. Jeffers has words like Austerlitz battles, but rather in their bloodiness and brute force. His almost unexampled brilliance of phrasing, his power of striking off passages that for the moment, at least, astound the reader into reverential awe, have perhaps never been better displayed than in his latest volume, Give Your Heart to the Hawks (Random House, $2.50). Moreover, his somewhat contradictory sensibility has expressed itself with unusual clearness in the shorter poems of the book. But his genius has been faithfully accompanied by its characteristic frenzy. The total want of moderation, the errors of excess, extravagance, and absurdity which have vitiated previous volumes, vitiate this also.

The book is too various to be discussed in detail. The poem from which the title is drawn, a long contemporary narrative, might well have been an achievement unapproachable by any other modern had Mr. Jeffers avoided the sheer ghastliness of the excesses to which he has gone, the extravagances grotesque at times to the point of being laughable. In theme and conception, it is a stern and classic story. A crime of passion is committed: a man kills his brother for a cause in which his wife participates. He at once is moved to confess and submit to the law; but his wife, a despiser of laws and of the state, persuades him to ‘give his heart to the hawks,’to bear a private burden of remorse, rather than expose the situation to dogs — that is, to his fellow men — and accept their judgment. But the burden is too much for him to sustain; it destroys him utterly. No contemporary, certainly, has caught hold of a tragic theme so large and splendid as this. But when Mr. Jeffers’s hero deliberately rakes his hands to the bone on the barbs of a wire fence (merely one of a series of physical horrors) it is evident that the author sees the conflict in irrelevant, not to say abnormal, terms.

In human life, pain and terror, in nature the least human aspects of the landscape, incite Mr. Jeffers to excessive exhilaration, and draw from him words and thoughts which startle the senses like the sudden emergence of a meteor from the darkness. The spectacle of men in civilization moves him only to disgust. Thus he seems a halfway hater of his kind, pouring the scorn of unforgettable phrases on men as a race, yet never making the practical suggestions for their extinction which the Houyhnlmms discussed with such admirable sobriety in Gulliver’s Travels. In the end, the ‘redeeming despair’ which Mr. Jeffers commends may turn out to be as false and sentimental as any attitude that disgusts him. His apparent worship of pain cannot be accepted as a reality, and the presence in his poems of repeated images and scenes of purely physical agony and horror does not argue well either for the balance of his sensibility or for his intelligence as an artist.

THEODORE MORRISON