Poems and Poses
GREEN WITH BEASTS. By W. S. Merwin. (Hart-Davis, 10s. 6d.) 'THE ideal poet is a self-pitying adolescent. The true poem expresses high-falutin emotionalism.' How often, if not precisely in these words, does one still see such a view put forward. Mr. Amis comments with his usual felicity :
There follow high words from a thwarted child Rightly denied what it would foul, threatening Grown-ups with its death, eager to gild The pose of writhing with the pose of resigning.
The English do not usually judge the depth of a man's feelings by the loudness of his outcries. Indeed, they recognise that the breast-beater is probably deriving enough pleasure from the sPectacle of his own reaction to derogate pretty considerably from the authenticity of his actual emotion. So it is with poetry. Mr. Amis is a poet of feeling as well as intelligence. His theme is not the Exploration of the Self, but something higher--the human condition. To take a particular point, how few poets there are who can write, not just about the egocentric stereotypes of 'passion,' but actually about men's attitudes to women. This, in his ironic yet tender way, Mr. Amis does. And in his shameless insight--one of the marks of a real poet—does with technical brilliance. I fully expect these poems to arouse some of the abusive misunderstanding that the writer's novels did. One Amisophobe line is that his verse is Empsonian. In reality its Clarity and strength are at the opposite point to that pole of darkness where (although they have reached it from opposite directions) Dylan Thomas and William Empson meet and virtually fuse into one emotional obscurantist—Willan Thompson perhaps? ? Again, work which, though undeniably fine, does not provide the true narcissistic frisson is sometimes downgraded to `verse, not poetry,' as if poetry was not an art but an attitude. (A Particularly silly Victorian might have said on similar grounds that Love Locked Out was Painting and L'Oly,npe was not.) Then too, rather less than half of the poems in Mr. Amis's book are to some extent 'light.' To those who confuse levity with frivolity this might mean that they are not serious. But in fact most of them are far more serious in any worth-while sense than the usual noble postures, just as Sancho Panza is a more serious character than Little Lord Fauntleroy. One or two of these poems, indeed, might merit the unpleasant epithet 'donnish,' tough for their subjects only, not their tone. And there are a few where an often effective coarseness of diction seems over- done. But that leaves a main body of work which is interesting, moving and novel; and which, as all good poetry should, purges the mind and heart of their quotidian sediments of cliché.
Those laid down by Dr. Abse, for example. His verse play deals
with a saintly character compelled by occupation troops to execute his own family. The blurb implies that this is an astonishingly daring plot, though I can't see why. As for the verse, Dr. Abse writes like this: `I thought my flickering soul would shriek / and tears fasten grooves upon my cheek / when she was lost to me.' But after a hundred pages this reviewer was too depressed even to mutter confusedly, 'What are flickering souls!' _ John Press's work is so superior to this both technically and emotionally that the reader finds himself expecting each poem ,.tll _to turn out better than in fact they usually do. A certain triteness, hot in his themes (which are often splendidly uninhibited) but in wording, thought and image, constantly prevents. 1.:Then the darkness began : it brushed/ Just lightly at first, l" it might be the wing/ Of a bird, a soft bird, that flutters/ As it conies down.' W. S. Merwin is, as you see, a slight writer. These loose and facile rhythms are not compensated for by any Weight or tension of meaning or feeling. The lapses into serious- ness are usually unfortunate. His is a decorative poetry with i°thing under the decorations. But it is seldom pretentious, and
spite of a bias against this sort of thing, I found much of it
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