Mixed Voices

In this swag of poetry the common denominator is not hard to find. The good poets are almost without exception the established ones. Edwin Muir’s selection (three poets in all, Iain Crichton Smith, Karen Gerahon, Christopherpage 390 Levenson) contains only the exact, highly intellectual, self-engendered poetry of crystalline universes moving in solitude, the poetry of scientists perhaps, to which this generation has been accustomed without asking whether it is worth writing. One is reminded of the Iron Virgin of Cologne, that interesting mediaeval instrument of torture who left her customers in a neat, round shape. In the Guinness anthology there is more life and variety – a stunted semantic undergrowth, but a good poem each by George Barker, Patricia Beer, Thomas Blackburn, A.D. Hope, Graham Hough, Christopher Logue, Dom Moraes and Allen Tate. It would be worth buying the book simply to read Allen Tate’s poem on a lynching. Thomas Blackburn also smells curiously of human nature among the brittle glass-and-wire structures of his contemporaries –

. . . And two men pick the turnips up
And two men pull the cart;
And yet between the four of them
No word is ever said,
Because the yeast was not put in
Which makes the human bread . . .

His poem is called ‘Hospital for Defectives’. It deeply and reverently questions the goodness of God.

The sonnets of Eleanor Farjeon should be to the taste of those who like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese – their theme and treatment are very similar. There is happy evidence, however, that the life which is mainly lacking in England is present in America. Robert Penn Warren writes most convincingly of dragons, ancestors, and skeletons in the family wardrobe! Robert Lowell understands the sub-zero life of New England and does not like it one bit. It seems that he periodically retires from it for a drying-out spell in a sanatorium for drunks: a lapsed Catholic and an excellent poet. Long may the gin wells flow for him! His sketches of Bostonian family antics are quite unique.

1959 (194)