Heart-rending Sense
Steps. By Robert Graves. (Cassell, 30s.) ROBERT FROST has often read his poetry to full houses in a Boston concert hall. On any other night it is speakers and orchestras. On.this night Frost, an unseasonable lyric virtuoso, reading naturally and roughly but with a high degree of contrivance, slaying them into calls for encores and favourite poems. It seems clear that a fair proportion even of the more subtle verse has its effect on the listeners, and the occasion is quite likely to leave a deep impression on someone who sees it for the first time.
These occasions flow naturally from the character of Frost's verse—and from a whole kind of poetry. It is Robert Graves's kind, and this 'new book is a reminder of his view that the only alternatives are shameful. He believes in a poetry which is 'sense; good sense; penetrating, often heart-rending sense,' and though he is an enemy of declamation, of any sort of verse and circuses, the poetry he likes could be publicly performed, as it is with such aplomb in Boston, and would flourish in performance because of the good sense it contains. He says in this book how much he admires Frost himself, of course, and how much he hates the Cantos of Pound— they pre 'vaudeville,'
a random sequence of sighs, coos, Bronx cheers, rhetorically garbled scraps of history, quota- tions from foreign tongues, falsetto screams and indecent eructations.
The Cantos are not a poetry of hunches 'checked by common sense,' that's to say, and their success is just one more vagary in the highbrow search for 'major' significance. Each letter of Steps indicates the different kinds of writing in the
book, but it is this talk about poetry, and the new poems themselves, which matter far more than anything else, though any antiquarian, and anyone with an aversion to metre, will no doubt find plenty to prefer.
It is true that, as he talks on- about poetry, a certain unpleasantness sometimes comes -up—as in the sarcasms about other writers like Eliot, for example, where the effect, astonishingly, is almost one of envy or pique. The tone he takes with the audiences whom he is telling about poetry and who have helped to pay for the writing of the book can get a little unpleasant, too : the in- feriority of Smith girls to Spanish peasants may be very great, but it can't carry this amount of grizzled condescension. These bits of barnacle don't do much to hold him up, however. The things he has to say about poetry, tucked away as they are in the general parcel, would mark him out as a man of rare if inflamed authority even if he had never been known to write a line of verse. His opinions are as manly and sincere and natural and shrewd as the poems are them- selves. Even his sense of contemporary _reputa- tions will come to seem much less eccentric than it may do to some people now. If eccentric is the word for Pound, in fact, it will hardly do for Graves. And it seems a very lucky thing that he should now be a major influence, if he would excuse the expression, with several of the most gifted younger writers in this country. If he has any doubt about the respect in which he is held, he has only to look at their poems.
The score of poems in Steps have his usual range and uncover once again his extraordinary staying-power : there are poems which must be as
good as any he has done. 'The Christmas Robin' is one very characteristic success. It is a delicate poem, but one which could sustain itself perfectly in Boston.
The snow of February had buried Christmas - Deep in the woods, where grew self-seeded The fir-trees of a Christmas not yet known, Without a candle.or a strand of tinsel.
It seems to be a poem about the future which; older people see. An elderly couple stop in the woods and -imagine a warm family gathering, among the Christmas trees. The intimations change, twisting the robin into something new and sinister, and the fourth verse is a marvellous, cold, alarming end.
But he knew better, did the Christmas robin— The murderous robin with his breast aglow And legs apart, in a spade-handle peiched : He prophesied more snow, and worse than snow.
Of the rest of the book, part is simply his bread and butter, as I think he would admit. Most of this is rambling and careless, though there are occasional lively passages : an amusing story about three Majorcans who are conned into travelling to the Regent Palace to testify in one of those mixed-up divorces which do duty as the bullfights of the Anglo-Saxons, and a devastating account of Sir Herbert Read's taxing book The Nature of Literature. One or two of the histori- cal excursions have a learned charm, though in general he might have asked himself how much on end of this sort of writing the reader is likely to be able to bear :
Theano, like Hecuba, is described as a daughter of Cisseus the Thracian; probably meaning that they were Aeacans from the Locrian city of Abdera in Thrace, named after Patro'clus's brother Abderus.
As for his matrilineal contentions, the talk abOut Amazons and goddesses, it seems to me -on this showing that the tongue-in-cheok way i11 which 'he makes his more shocking remarks is never wholly absent from his most intense pas' sages—which must be taken seriously if the whole undertaking is not to fall to the ground. There is an air of teasing us, challenging us to dis' believe him, taking it out on us perhaps for not sufficiently appreciating the poetry which is his main interest. Very often, I'm bound to say, Elio': speculations look like Graves's own form of vaudeville. (They certainly have their 'scraps of history,' quotations from foreign tongues.') Man). good poets have had hypotheses like this; in a world in which the normal practice of poetry' has itself become unseasonable they may have their protective or permissive uses. With Potted it has gone down disastrously into the bone. With Graves it never gets beyond the edges of his creative work, in which he keeps up a very different set of standards. His interest in myth' with all its screeds and surprises, may have been useful to his poetry.' 'Heart-rending sense' i5 something else again. KARL, MO-0'R
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