American Voices

It is good news that an anthology of modern American poetry has now come within easy reach of the pocket of the ordinary reader. After Carlos Williams’s Little Treasury of Modern Poetry there is no other book of this kind to present a varied and adequate selection from this complex field. Ignoring the smoke- screen of factional argument which American critics have themselves put up, one can distinguish three main lines of development – the ‘Here is America’ approach, deriving from such exemplars as Whitman and the author of the Spoon River Anthology; the ‘Court poetry without a court’, written, though not exclusively, by southern poets; and the ‘scientific language’ of Karl Shapiro and many other recent poets. It would seem that America presents her poets with too little and too much: a wealth of crises and a dearth of stable notions of God, society and themselves, by which these men could be linked and interpreted. Thus comes the paradox, recurrent throughout these poems, of a social-optimistic myth coupled with an intensely negative personal view of life. Shapiro writes –

And we have seen that when the hero lifts
The vizor of his helmet to the gaze
Of the ecstatic myth-mad populace
That it is nothing but a shell, a voice
Without a face, a brash and neutral horn
That amplifies our disappointing hopes . . .

One has the sense of a skeleton in a closet and poets too erudite to know the simple words that could pulverise it or bring it to life again. Perhaps the Southern poets are the most fortunate, who have ready to hand a Homeric myth, anti-urban, the old hates and blood-guilts of the Civil War. The elder and more formal poets impress me most (Frost, Robinson, Eliot, Crowe Ransom) – not on account of their technical competence (some of the younger have them there on the hip), but by simple evocative diction and a sense of continuity in the natural world and in the lives of men. Their work has its distinctive tang; but they seem, happily, to have paid little attention to critics trying write their poems for them.

1954 (93)