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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

American Poets

American Poets

Among the ten American poets here examined by Mr Donoghue, seven – Whitman, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Lowell, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens – were already known to me by reading and by other critical commentaries; one, Theodore Roethke, was known to me by his verse alone; and two – Frederick O. Tuckerman and J.V. Cunningham – were wholly unknown to me.

One of the real, perhaps inevitable disadvantages of Mr Donoghue’s survey is that he frequently treats unequal poems and unequal poets with equal and dedicated seriousness. Thus in the fifth chapter his examination of Edwin Arlington Robinson, J.V. Cunningham and Robert Lowell, would give few clues to a reader unfamiliar with those poets that Lowell is certainly after Yeats the great master of rhetoric in our century, that Robinson’s work is nearly always vitiated by wordiness and monotony (perhaps because he was a good anecdotal poet who fell into the error of supposing himself a philosopher), and that Cunningham’s work (I can only go by the quotations Mr Donoghue has given us) is pretentiously trivial.

It is the difficulty, I suppose, of an idealist criticism which tries to fit more or less unconnected poems into a literary hold-all stamped (it may be unkind) ‘The American Thing’. Frederick G. Tuckerman’s work is not trivial, but it is still pretentious and dated in the way that nineteenth page 249 century verse so easily dates. I doubt if Mr Donoghue does either poet a good service when he writes in the following terms of awkward comparison – ‘. . . Whitman and Tuckerman are typical American poets in assuming that for the work in hand they must rely upon their own resources. Each is, to himself, a Robinson Crusoe. Tuckerman is a private man, an amateur, a scholar, astronomer, botanist, recluse. Whitman thinks of his role in much more public terms. . . .’

What in fact have Whitman and Tuckerman in common except that they inhabited the same country and the same century? But Mr Donoghue writes well about Whitman and about Melville, because (I take it) in each case his sympathies are fully engaged. I had the bad luck to read his essay on Emily Dickinson immediately after reading Allen Tate’s shorter essay about the same writer, and this, by contrast, spoilt it for me. What finally weakens Mr Donoghue’s well-written book is his inability to stand outside the Puritan and hominist tradition within which most of his poets stand. Tate can do this; and his criticism is the stronger for it.

1967 (414)