Explaining the Poets

This critical miscellany, as the author tells us in a frank and disarming preface, has been ‘gathered . . . from an extraordinary variety of sources’, from broadcast talks, lectures and reviews. Mr Fraser is in fact something of a professional explainer of other poet’s work: a dangerous profession, in which one soon learns to slip on an attitude like a glove. He is no great scholar. His insights are not profound. He seems constitutionally unable to suggest that an established poet (Wallace Stevens or Stephen Spender, for example) may be flooding the market with junk. Yet I would recommend this uneven collection to anyone who wanted to know what modern poetry is about, rather than any magisterial essay by T.S. Eliot or Allen Tate. The point is that Mr Fraser has no grand thesis to illustrate. He is simply a good, intelligent listener, and such people, at a critical level, are very rare indeed. On account of this, he is often able to shed new daylight on the work of ‘difficult’ poets. His study of Dylan Thomas is particularly rewarding – ‘I have been told that some work he (Thomas) did on a documentary film on the bombing raids, which in the end was found too grim for public release, had a profound effect on his imagination; an effect that may partly explain the retreat, in many of his later poems, to the theme of childhood innocence and country peace . . .’.

Mr Fraser recognises that poems are written by men, not by electronic adding machines. His approach is invariably personal. His assessment of the poetry of W.H. Auden fails as a whole, because he feels little sympathy with that cosmopolitan poet-philosopher. Yet his book contains the most stimulating essays to be found on the work and personalities of W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, and the young modern English poets. It deserves to be read widely.

1959 (190)