Rhyme-Lag
Then There Was Fire. By Minou Drouet. (Hamish Hamilton, 10s. 6d.) A Beginning. By Dom Moraes. (The Parton Press, 8s. 6d.) Brutus's Orchard. By Roy Fuller. (Andre Deutsch, 12s. 6d.) Errors of Observation. By Gordon Wharton. (University of Reading Press, 5s.) Home Truths. By Anthony Thwaite. (Marvell Press, 10s. 6d.) MINOU DROUET'S poems are interesting simply because she is ten years old. They prove one Important critical point : that the type of poetry most admired by some readers can, in certain circumstances, be produced before puberty, let alone matriculation. But of course there are plenty of grown-up poets and critics who are, in effect, Physically enlarged Minous. Education and experience do not always take. Will this object lesson make them more willing to assimilate the adult forms of the art? No.
The poems of nineteen-year-old Mr. Moraes have been praised for 'tenderness and loneliness,' but don't let that put you off. As a figure of terrific significance for art, the tender-and-lonely adolescent is, like the angry young man, an invention of the sloppy nostalgia of middle age (my dear, what an angry young man!). The trouble is that some juvenile hams are tempted to live the characters invented for them by their elders. But Mr. Morass's verse is already fuller and stronger than such two-edged praise would suggest, and in the circumstances the fact that some of his Material is a bit adolescent can hardly be held against him, let alone for him. It is difficult to predict the possibilities of an Indian writing English poetry (and older readers will have to repress an unfair reflex shudder at anything that could possibly recall the Tamby-pamby episode). But at least Mr. Moraes is already as good as any of our published poets under twenty-five.
Even when young, Mr. Fuller was setting his chisel to a harder stone. He never fails to try to illuminate all the segments and fragments of experience before putting them back into a syn- thesis. And I am far from implying that he is lacking in a sense of humour or a sense of propor- tion when I say that he seems to me to be the one truly serious poet of his generation, as well as one of the finest. Invariably presenting a deep, stoic concern with the human condition, he finds a more powerful and vivid material in minor events and appearances than the Cain-and- crucifixion lot can in all their galaxies of blood and fire. Perhaps his more sublunar images do just occasionally mike for a certain amount of dead weight—the life of a lung-worm is just ia trifle undramatic when it comes to sustaining a forty-two-line allegory. But you cannot afford not to buy this book to read and reread the title poem and a score of other clear and firm, yet imaginative and compelling, illustrations of our 'romantic, classic situation.'
Dr. Davie has always been the poet most obviously annoying to those enraged with what they call 'The Movement.' For with him, much more than with the superficial logic-chopping of the imitators of William Empson, thought stood four-square and shameless, cut to the bare iambic, in the art form which so many people would
prefer to exclude to the advantage of lower, or at any rate other, manifestations. In his present volume intellectual clarity remains the strongest ingredient, but it goes deeper into the passionate man. The powers of the mind, one feels, having passed rigorous initiation tests, are being allowed to miscegenate with the darker inhabitants of his world. He has progressed (if that is the word) to an almost Wordsworthian romanticism—and after all it was Wordsworth (no modern sub- romantic) who pointed out that the human mind is capable of being affected 'without the applica- tion of gross and violent stimulants.' One sees in Dr. Davie a patient, mature development, with long-term aims. His book gives the impression of being the foundation-stone of some vast project. But it is a perfectly good monolith in its own right, to be ignored only by people who prefer mud huts.
Dr. Davie is probably much in Mr. Alan Pryce- Jones's mind when (in his preface to Mr. Giles's book) he is a bit sour on modern poets writing in a depersonalised way 'as in the time of Dr. Johnson.' Thus, he feels, they lack a 'strongly individual voice.' Personality? Individuality? As so often after such build-ups, one finds that Mr. Giles's typical fault is a tendency to triteness. Still, his verse is often respectable, and some- times striking. (And it is nice to see a new pub- lisher venturing on poetry at all.) Mr. Wharton's poetry has often struck me as a little disappointing in magazines, but on reading his book I blame myself. It requires and repays more concentration than verse in periodicals usually gets. As is customary from this press, there are one or two bits of villanelle and terza rima, but these are the merest (and no doubt early) gestures towards that fashion. In most of his poems an individual voice has really been achieved. Yet it is notably unpresumptuous, quite lacking in the self-regard which sometimes goes with intelligent verse. Perhaps Mr. Wharton has not yet quite found his stance, but at its best this is penetrating stuff; odd yet natural, personal yet monumental.
I must admit that, while admiring Anthony Thwaite's competence, I had always thought of him as just another, if rather superior, change- ringer on the neo-classical conventions. Home Truths shows different. In a number of the best poems here complex adult experience is forged into works of art, and not in the easy old way of leaving out or distorting the more refractory bits. This is strong and solid work, and even resonant; and a certain monotony in the earlier poems is beginning to loosen up. Impressiveness isn't every- thing, certainly. All the same, and particularly with a young writer, it is a real achievement that, for once, 'impressive' really is the right word.
ROBERT CONQUEST
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