Inner Worlds

The endless subjective ‘epiclesis’ of the Cantos will continue very likely as long as Ezra Pound lives. It embodies the accumulated, though fragmentary knowledge of an American scholar-poet whose sanity has been in question.

page 428

Some critics regard the Cantos as a master-work. I prefer to see them as the debris of one man’s inner world interspersed by poignant, though equally fragmentary lyrics. In this latest collection the lyrical passages are few and the Chinese ideograms are many.

Mr Duncan has tried to imitate Catullus. Sincerity, accuracy, an intensely personal note, in these poems provoked by a love-affair, do not wholly balance the lack of formal unity. Nor is Mr Duncan’s bitch-goddess ever as real as her archetype, Lesbia. Yet he writes with dramatic effect; and contrives in one poem to introduce four-letter words without smashing the pattern of argument – in itself, a rare enough feat.

The knotted rhythms and compact metaphors of Mr Hughes’s poetry spring naturally from his deep, original vision of man and nature. He seems to understand and penetrate the irrational life of animals. In parts his book reads like a modern bestiary –

Now, you are strong as the earth you have entered.
This is a birthplace picture. Green into blue
The hills run deep and limpid. The weasel’s
Berry-eyed red lock-head, gripping the dream
That holds good, goes lost in the heaved calm
Of the earth you have entered.

These six oblique lines make up an entire poem, an epitaph. The dead man and the weasel join in one image. It is very like the world of a child’s imagination – equally pure and equally ferocious. Whatever the writer touches (a dead pig, Cleopatra, an old man in a pub) comes immediately to life with an obscure physical violence. It could be whimsy; but it is more likely a rare intuition that perceives directly the mysterious thing-in-itself. Mr Hughes has forged out a most effective medium to clothe his intuitions.

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