Looking For The Actual
Selected Poems. By John Peale Bishop. (Chatto and WinduS, 12s. 6d.) Selected Poems 19234958. By E. E. Cummings.
Country Matters. By Oliver 8s. 6d.) The Only Need. By Brian Schnman, .8s. 6d.)
JOHN PEALE BISHOP is familiar to any reader of the anthologies and more or less little magazines of the past twenty years. He died in 1944. The name goes along with Allen Tate's. John Crowe Ransom's, • Robert Penn Warren's that very successful literary pressure-group from the Southern States. Why did I never follow him up? Now I know why. His is Tate's sort of poetry, or Warren's (Ransom is rather different). ritten Without their talent. And very tedious and pre- tentious iris. The theory was that the history_ of the South supplied these ss ritcrs with a tragic and religious sense hardly to be found "among Other Americans; and that the way of Ade in the Old South was full of usages and attitudes which had a symbolic significance and a ftinction. as ritual. This may or may not be valid history; as a set of wOrking assumptions, these ideas harmcd at least as much as they helped. In particular the business about ritual and symbol and myth handed them over gagged and bound into the hands of Eliot, or of Eliot as they interpreted. him; and the business about tragedy and religion surrendered them to, in particular, the Eliot who was 'Anglo-Catholic in religion and Royalist in politics,' who played at being Jacobean theologian or a Jacobean playwright. Hunting the symbol and the myth so hard, and busily working in bits of Eliot and John - Webster and Yeats, they seldom had time to , render the actual in its actuality at all. This may be hard on Tale or Warren; it is the barest truth about Bishop. There never was such a derivative Writer; 'Proud Donne was one did not believe In heirs presumptive to a bone' (Eliot, 'Webster was much .possessed by death And saw. the skull beneath the skin'); 'where the coming on of even- ing is the letting down of blue and azure veils' (Owen, 'And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds); and so on--Yeats is there as well, and Pound. And this is the poet of whom Tate tells us that one poem is 'a classic of this century' and another 'one of the great American poems of our time.' Its astonishing how easy it is now to see through what fifteen or twenty years ago would have bemused us; how clear it is now that the great American poems of the time were not in this style at all, but in the Imagist tradition (Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop) or else• the work of dry neo-classieists like Louise -Rogan and Yvor Winters.
Or else they were by Cummings. While Bishop was being praised, Cummings was sold very short. And so he is still. For one thing his defenders have always been even More naïve than he is him- self, The latest of them, Norman Friedman, is still on the defensive and unable to make con- cessions. But he has a few of the newer critical gimmicks to play with; and what's more impor- tant, he recognises, as critics under Eliot's shadow couldn't, that while a capacity for tragic perceptions may be a good thing for a poet to have, it isn't a sine qua. non. Cummings lacks this capacity, as Pound does. The lack of it is most damaging to both of them _ when they attempt to criticise society; and it is a pity that the new Selected Poems of Cummings should lean so heavily on what Friedman calls his 'satires: These are brilliant, dexterous and wildly funny; and so long as we take them for what they are, not satires but lampoons, they are tonic reading, But Cummings's irreplaceable achievement is elsewhere, separated by a hair's breadth from his .grossest sentimentalities. Reading a poem about Christmas trees or sonic of the innumerable love poems. one doesn't know where to look; but reading 'Spring is like .1 perhaps hand,' one looks at Spring --afresh, and hard.• Cummings may not be quite a great poet, but he is big enough to cast an engulfing shade over whateser British verse is likely to show up at any one time. •To be sure there's a posthumous collection by that never less than respectable writer, Frances Cornford. Of On- a Calm Shore. very prettily illustrated and. cheap at the price, one feels only that calm it is indeed. Nothing gets more emphasis than it demands, and it wasn't Mrs. Cornford's fault that she lived .very unemphatic life in the least emphatic of all English landscapes, Cambridge and its en- virons. But how unemphatic can poetry be, and still • be poetry? Oliver Bernard may have been reading Cummings, and learned from him largely to dispense \‘ith punctuation. If so. it's a pity: the des ice in isolation is a distracting mannerism. Anyw ay Mr. Bernard is another sort from
Cummings altogether; he may lack the tragic vision' but he's a great worrier, like any poet of the Fifties. And actuality mostly gets swallowed up in worries and arguments with himself. Still. though he's not in his first youth and apparently
isn't a beginner, he is-casting about. intelligently. I reckon he ought to cast some more towards imagism. as with 'First Quarter.'
Brian Higgins is a much more interesting person than Oliver Bernard; unfortunately he is very much less of a poet. I'm not sure that he's esen trying, or knows how to. Heaps of actuality here; not very fresh, certainly not re-created, but all seen with a convincingly impartial indigna- tion. This is the voice of the Sixties,' perhaps; :t has nothing to do- with poetry. And yet rumour
has it that The Only Need barely escaped recom- mendation by the Poetry Book Society. Weil, well. I back Brian Higgins for next year's Guinness awards,
DONALD DAVIF
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