American Poetry
A WELL-COMPILED selection of American verse is a valuable book, particularly for one who wants to know the background of much modern poetry, or to understand what has proved to be the most energetic force in the poetry of this century. Because the influence of England and Europe on American poets has .given them their language and the main part of such literary history as they have needed to adopt, this force is difficult to isolate ; and the valuable contribution of an anthology is not to show poetry which is peculiar to America, so much as to bring together the best works of American poets Those who happen to know American poetry through the previous Oxford Book of American Verse (1927) will be struck by the extent to which American poetry, and America's criticisms of her own poetry, have improved since that year. The late Professor Matthiessen has chosen the poetry for the new Oxford Book of American Verse with the discrimination that was necessary for such an important task, though he has not followed the customary rules for anthologies and books of Golden Verse. His selection gives a historical view of the American tradition, without including any poems on merely historical grounds. In a long anthology—this runs to over 1,100 pages—the reader is usually surfeited by an excess of more or less equally meritorious lyrics by a number of writers with which he has no chance of growing really acquainted. Professor Matthiessen has represented fewer poets by more and longer works, and this rule is justified by the result. If the book is read through as though it were a unit, illustrating the growth of a varied national tradition, it is only with a few of the least important poets, or only with that poetry which came directly from some movement such as Imagism, that you find the individual natures of the poets thrown out of proportion by the size of their background.
As more than half the book is composed of works which were written in the last fifty years, there cannot be the same certainty that the editor's choice was the right choice as there might be with a book of older works. For instance, the poems taken from Auden do not appear to represent him at his best, though they show him at his most American. In the same way, the choice of " The Dry Salvages " rather than " Little Gidding " reveals the more American aspect of Eliot's latest work at the expense of concealing the more English. This is inevitable, and from the point of view of American literary history it is valuable and interesting, for it focuses attention on some origins of their work which we might not otherwise have troubled to observe. But the compiler's intention was to include nothing on merely historical principles, and one wonders whether the geographical principle has not sometimes been over-emphasised•, at other times ignored. The influences of American and English poetry on each other have been so profound in this century that any attempt to separate the American from the English examples of the work of those who stood on the bridge is bound to give a one-sided view of their achievement. But it is with unexpected satisfaction that one lays down the book, having been given—partly through the introduction, but even more by the text—a sense of a tradition which is not just changing, or merely carrying on, but which is now on the verge of its maturity. In this anthology the great originals of American poetry stand out clearly. On the one hand there is Whitman expressing a kind of personality which is inclusively and exclusively American,
representing and giving confidence to the diffuse poet—the poet whose way of seeing things and people comes first, his craft second. We see him followed, and his method sustained, by poets like Carl Sandburg, and others, including Archibald MacLeish, who have tried to find suitable forms for a poetry of public speech, have tried to re-learn arts of rhetoric. On the other hand there is Poe, whose few short poems were the earliest examples of symbolism, and the movement towards purity and away from diffuseness in verse—a movement which reached a climax in Wallace Stevens, with poems like " Sunday Morning "—a general movement that pervades half the poetry in this book and which has been characterised, as Professor Matthiessen said, by " devotion to craftsmanship," even though many of its participants have nothing but this devotion in common. Then there is a third branch of the tradition rising from the poetry of Emily Dickinson, who in less space can put more feeling than any of her nation ; and finally there is the poetry of Robert Frost, which can be traced back through Whittier to the fruitful influence of Wordsworth on American verse, and which developed a kind of narrative poetry which had died out in England.
The sense you are left with—that the best American poetry is just about to be written—cannot be defined exactly. In the last fifty years the great achievement of this poetry has been a technical achievement—a learning how to use language of almost any kind for the widest possible purposes. The experiments it has made have been useful where they have not been successful, and the develop- ment of new kinds of formal style is being accomplished by poets like Robert Lowell with confidence and independence, where the same movement in England has been to some extent inspired by
a sense of futility or romantic nostalgia. RICHARD MURPHY.
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