THE judgment of Jesse Stuart, and I should like to add of his publisher, has been anything but mature in the production of the 703 sonnets and pseudo-sonnets which make up Man with a Bull-tongue Plow (Dutton, $3.00). Here is a novice in poetry who might well study both art and modesty. The reason why his book contains 703 sonnets is that no one sonnet is good. Here is that self-conscious primitivism, that run-to-seed Wordsworthianism, the travesty and debasement of the true poetry of nature, which proclaims the love of the furrows and of rustic people without selection and without discipline, either intellectual or moral. Mr. Stuart tells us that spring follows winter; he begs leave to drop his plough and to sing an ill-considered rhyme to which no one need pay attention (except the publisher and the reader); he tells us that he is not to be bought or bribed, without indicating to what temptations of this sort he might be subjected; he presents us in verse with that gallery of Southern primitives whom we have met already, and better described, in prose fiction — the young bloods who go wenching by the creek, the lawbreakers, the old men who see superstitious visions of God; and he writes such accomplished couplets as
His children are victims of circumstance,
But Lum leaves them and goes to the square dance.
But of course where there is so much ore there is some gold. Mr. Stuart now and again produces a naïvely charming piece of natural description. A blatant primitivism will not, it is to be hoped, carry him far in the years to come; Mr. Stuart should reflect and catch hold of himself while there is yet time.
No poet can feel a more natural or appropriate ambition than the impatient desire to express his native land in vigorous flights of verse. Everyone, certainly, wishes America to be fittingly celebrated in native poetry. But it is not fitting that a volume which purports to satisfy this wish should be accepted on such grounds alone. It should be put to the test of merit, and the test should be the sterner simply because the factitious and the inflated are so easily allowed to pass for the genuine in affairs of patriotism. Paul Engle’s American Song (Doubleday, $1.75) has been much praised, and has accomplished one desirable and rare achievement for poetry by getting itself widely bought and read.
Mr. Engle gives every indication of having read the ‘Invocation’ which Mr. Benet prefixed to John Brown‘s Body; he seems acquainted also with the ‘American Letter’ and perhaps the ‘Frescoes’ of Archibald MacLeish. But he seems to have grasped at the theme of such performances before serving his apprenticeship to the art which made such a triumph as the ‘Frescoes’ possible. Mr. Engle still has everything to learn about the job of making good verses. His ear is neither discriminating nor exacting. He strikes off fine descriptive lines and stirring images by the force of a certain vigor and boldness of imagination which many young men possess. But he is irregular and careless, and his rhetoric is often merely the verse counterpart of bad prose, a confusion of incongruous figures, an inchoate piling up of clauses to form periods without shape or nicety of design. He writes in a highly inflated style of expansive youthful emotion. Here his exclamatory propensities betray him; a partial list of his apostrophes includes the following: ‘O land of the live machines, O Manhattan towers, O sick-for-earth Geranium in the old tomato can, O wood thrush, O grey gull, O meadowlark, O Independence Rock, O splendid flame that madly makes us men, O that we march, O white blood, O Trelawney, O Shelley, O go down, Moses.’ Mr. Engle was first sponsored by the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He would do well to study one of his successors in the Series, a young woman named Shirley Barker, whose Dark Hills Under shows all the unpretentiousness, the maturity of perception, and the careful attention to method which Mr. Engle as yet lacks.
THEODORE MORRISON