Poets Who Wear Well

AMID the novelty of the new books, the reader is likely to overlook the current reissues of poems first published long ago. This year Scribner’s is bringing out the Selected Poems of Oscar Williams, which range from 1921 to today. Between his first book and the later ones came a sharp break explained by his long self-exile from art into advertising. He is superbly original in idea and imagery.

Excitingly crowded with a thousand metaphors for tragedy and menace, Oscar Williams’s book is the authentic mirror of our urban industrial stress. It is a brilliant mirror, and any reader trapped in our big cities is urged to peer into it; he may see his true reflection for the first time. In 1940, when Williams published The Man Coming Toward You, W. H Auden (one of the few to get the point of the book) commented: —

The poems in Oscar Williams’s book are concerned largely with the spiritual breakdown of the times. He feels that the mechanized life is the Devil, and the subject of many of his poems is just this theme. . . . But unlike many romantics, Mr. Williams has lived successfully in the world that he attacks, and in whose values he once believed.

Readers with access to Williams’s earlier books will be impressed by his revisions in the present volume. Aspiring apprentices, perusing abstract rules of composition, can learn a lot concretely in ten minutes by simply reading side by side the two versions of “On the Sudden Death of a Young Acquaintance.” The original appeared in The Man Coming Toward You, and the revised version is in Selected Poems, seven years later. The difference is an object lesson in where and where not to stalk the mot juste. For example, the “colossal stone of space” becomes the “massive stone of space.” Here the impossible word was “colossal.” a living word in Milton’s day but foully murdered by Hollywood. “Forgive me if my heart sags with aching anti if 1 cry,” becomes: “Forgive me if my heart cringes w ith those who die.” The final rhyme-vowel is retained but not with so maudlin a phrase as “I cry” (quite literally a tear-jerker). The emotion is also, changed, no longer self-pity but a broader sympathy with others, “with those who die.”

Williams is most compelling and most himself when he is tender and angry at the same time. In one breath he loves and hates the zest and corruntion of his sidewalks of New York. “This undoubtedly is life,”he chants in an autobiographical poem, “and there isn’t a soul that wants it that way.” Yet some part of us unconsciously does “want it that way.” On battlefields and in factories, machines do, it is true, crush their humans; but this is only because humans first built machines to be as they are. The original sin is a moral and not a material one. Consider Williams’s poem “Subway.” Here “the subway’s galvanized throat is torn into craters of speed,” while “civilization roared on, into the darkness of the nervous system.” But the horror and ugliness and noise are not at all in the subway’s steel but in the screaming heart of man: —

Man does not scream in Wallace Stevens or Robert Hillyer but sings wistfully. Theirs is the drawing room more often than the subway express. Yet Hillyer and Stevens have this in common with Williams: they all seem besieged, outlawed, on the defensive, guarding their individuality and that of their readers from the onslaught of mechanized mediocrity. Not pathetically but with the dignity of integrity, all t hree are clutching whatever shreds of beauty they can salvage from banality on the march.

In many ways Stevens’s diction is the most magical of our day. Of all living poets he is the subtlest in producing deliberate esthetic effects. For this he pays a price, a loss in simple spontaneity. But the result is worth the price. We have so many earthy-primitive “natural” poets, who follow Walt Whitman in crying “O spontaneous me!” Yet America produced only one Stevens.

Harmonium, which Knopf has reissued this year, was a turning point in the culture of the twenties. It is one of the four books that almost singlehanded account for the modernity of “modern” poetry. The other three ary Eliot’s Waste Land, Hart Crane’s Bridge, and Auden’s Orators, along with the esthetic theory of the Imagists, Pound, Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom. I could name ten of the younger poets of the 1940’s who are, for better or worse, incalculably indebted to the nuance and sensitivity of Harmonium. It could not have been republished at a more opportune date. Typical of its beauty is this deathless passage about the encroachment of death (which the reader may compare or contrast with a passage on a similar theme by Hillyer, to be quoted later): —

Precision — in rhyme, in meter, in stanza form — this is the special perfection of Robert Hillyer. Delightful to ear as well as eye, his new selection is a living rebuke to the arid and prosaic school of poetry. His lines can be sung. They remind us that lyric verse, though by no means the twin, is still the cousin of music.

Robert Ilillyer’s Collected Verse appeared in 1984. But despite the finality, the almost posthumous tone of the word Collected, Prospero usually thinks twice before destroying his wand of song. Like Yeats, who wrote some of his finest lines after Macmillan brought out his Collected Poems, Hillyer has continued his literary productivity during the thirteen years following 1934. The result, is Poems for Music, 1917-1947 (also by Knopf). The book could well have been entitled Collected Lyrical Poems, for it is restricted to lyrics and contains his seventy favorites in this genre. They sound as fresh and exhilarating as if written this morning instead of sometimes as far back as 1917.

Unlike the usual publishers’ blurbs with their super-superlatives, the jacket blurb on Poems for Music lauds Hillyer with an all too guarded reserve, labeling his work “conventional poetry.” Actually it is the sloppy pseudo-surrealist poets who are conventional. Theirs is that most sterile and tyrannic of all conventions, the conformism of adolescent defiance, disorder as a “new” order, the cheap and easy revolutions of Bohemia, the rive-gaucheries of the rive gauche. It was unconventional of Robert Hillyer to have stuck to his guns, the guns of discipline, clarity, and esthetic conservatism.

Hillyer’s role is like that of a Partisan leader, waging guerrilla warfare for a school of poetry which once ruled Parnassus but was driven underground. He refused to be a collaborationist with the newfangled dictatorship of an unmelodious Free Verse. Scorning present popularity, he swore loyalty to the unfaded (and sometimes even faded) glories of the past. He stood with that small beleaguered band who held the fort of Form in an age when Content was bursting its controls and turning into gush.

His courage has been justified. Time has proved Robert Hillyer right. Many more poets have been returning to rigor and traffic lights, to conservatism in a non-stuffy sense of the word, while at the same time (like true evolutionary conservatives and not static reactionaries) assimilating the precious gains of the innovators. The hour is at hand for America’s many unpublicized traditional craftsmen, who tended their pure and unfashionable fire, to claim the credit they deserve. And what Hillyer deserves is more than a grudging, insulting, patronizing praise, such as he has been getting from “friendly” critics for years, about what they call “his nice convent ional rhyming.”

A long time ago I accidentally found in a newspaper a lyric of Hillyer’s, called “Hesperides,” which I liked so much that I could not forget its closing lines. “Hesperides” is the most moving of his lyrics, a singing transcendence of death. Yet I looked for it in vain in his new collection. Why cannot a poet infallibly pick his own best works? Is it because any creative writer confuses intention with result and chooses his most ambitious rather than his most achieved poems? Failing to find “Hesperides” in Poems for Music, I hit upon an at tractive Little Magazine named The Lyric, whose summer number is entirely devoted to Hillyer. There found the missing piece: —