Title Poem Research Articles

The Melody of the Spoken Word: A Study of James Still's Hounds on the Mountain

The Melody ofthe Spoken Word: A Study ofJames Still's Hounds on the Mountain by John Napier Or may the heart's breath on the slender reed Sing bright virelays to match the oriole?— The tulip tree the lyre that one must heed When the dulcimers are gone, when afternoons attend The silver underleaf of poplars in the wind? Sadly enough there is not a great deal of modern poetry that one wishes to go back to and read again as one would go back and play a lasting tune—for the sake of hearing its melody again. A few of Frost's poems, De la Mare's, a few of Yeats's, have this kind of music. But for the most part, even those modern poems that interest us most do so for reasons other than their intrinsic music. The music I am speaking of is found in the finest lyrics of our language. I think of Shakespeare's songs, of Burns, of Herrick, and of Jonson, his master. And I think that such music is notably allied with the melody of the spoken word. It is not the cold impersonal music of the tone poem, but is rather speech on the verge of becoming song—words for setting to music with the tune already implied, as in Thomas Campion's "Follow Your Saint." 56 Several of the poems in Hounds on the Mountain have such implicit melody. "Mountain Dulcimer," with its unique metrical pattern, resembling dipodic verse but made on a pattern of threes instead of twos, has this kind of song: The dulcimer sings from fretted maple throat Of the doe's swift poise, the fox's fleeting step And music of hounds upon the outward slope Stirring the night, drumming the ridge-strewn way, The anvil's strength . . . and the silence after That aches and cries unhushed into the day. From the dulcimer's breast sound hunting horns Strong as clenched hands upon the edge of death, The creak of saddle-bags, of oxen yoke and thongs, Wild turkey's treble, dark sudden flight of crows, Of unshod hoofs . . . and the stillness after, Bitter as salt drenching the tongue of pain: And of the lambs crying, breath of the lark, Long drinks from piggins hard against the lips; And with hoarse singing, raw as hickory shagbark, The foal's anxiety is woven with the straining wedge And the wasp's anger . . . and the quiet after For the carver of maple on a keen blade's edge. The basic pattern, near but not too near to the dance, is used in almost its full range by James Still. He varies the position of the caesura and subdues the regularity of trochaic phrasing until it becomes a kind of chant in "Child in the Hills": Where on these hills are tracks a small foot made, Where rests the echo of his voice calling to the crows In sprouting corn? Here are tall trees his eyes Have measured to their tops, here lies fallow earth Unfurrowed by terracing plows these sleeping years. Here flow the waters of Carr before his darkened door. Or he disciplines it most severely until it achieves its perfection in the elegance of the title poem: Slow the dull fulcrum, slow the arched leanings Of hill on hill and witless lifting of stark eyes To craven stone. White the wet lattice of morning Over dusty drums, and keen the agony of dry roots Questing beneath the earth. 57 Lean as brown straws The hounds of day tread out thickets of darkness, Damp the grasses their bodies have brushed in passing, Thinner than fly-wings, heavier than words in a cavern, Wilder than thoughts creaming the tongue unspoken. Hounds on the mountain . . . Grey and swift spinning the quarry shall turn At the cove's ending, at the slow day's breaking, And lave the violent shadows with her blood. The pattern achieves its perfection as pattern here, but song has been subdued under the stress of intellect. "Child in the Hills" occupies a middle ground between the pure lyric quality of "Mountain Dulcimer" and the more abstract "Hounds on the Mountain." Still's mastery of song...

The Southern Cross by Charles Wright

268 Western American Literature versity of Nebraska Press, 1981) came out only a little before their own work; and the two volumes complement each other very nicely. The book is arranged in three parts, Part I, A Bibliography of Native American Writers, Part II, A Bibliography of Native American Writers Known Only by Pen Names, and Part III, Biographical Notes: these are followed by an Index of Writers by Tribal Affiliation, and a Subject Index. (It is interesting to note that other than under the listing for Indian, and Indians, American, the greatest number of entries are found under the head­ ings Cherokee Nation, and under Education.) Users of the book will be particularly grateful for the third part; although some further information about the lives of the authors cited may occasionally be desired, Littlefield and Parins have made the way to it a good deal easier. Perhaps it would have been more helpful still if they had appended to each of their biographi­ cal notes the sources for their information. These are given generally in the Preface, but one might occasionally wish to know the particular sources for a particular entry (this might have been done with a list of abbreviations). Littlefield and Parins have also attempted to aid students of Indian writing by providing a generic classification (A = Address, C = Collections and Compilations, D = Drama, etc.) for each of their entries. This is a pro­ cedure potentially fraught with difficulty, inasmuch as the question of genre has been made problematical by recent critical theory. But the compilers are modest and entirely sensible: I have not been able to find an instance worth quarreling about. The Biobibliography is a fine piece of work, and it is exactly for that reason that I must register one complaint. This book is physically unattrac­ tive, a most un-book-ish book: the pages look like typescript with titles underlined rather than italicized and with ragged right hand margin; the (computer?) type is small and ugly. Littlefield and Parins have produced something valuable; it is too bad Scarecrow Press could not make it some­ what better looking. ARNOLD KRUPAT, Sarah Lawrence College The Southern Cross. By Charles Wright. (New York: Random House, 1981. 65 pages, $10.50.) When the seer was asked by Liriope if her son Narcissus was destined to achieve maturity. Teiresias replied, “Yes, if he never knows himself.” Since contemporary poetry is often an unrelenting quest for the poet’s own selfness, too often immature ego or gland clamor rather than search for position within objective reality, it is rewarding to find in his quest such multiplicity of spiritual discoveries as are shared by Charles Wright in this volume. He circumnavigates his complex world, guided by a southern cross “hanging like a kite in the sky.” Reviews 269 The opening poem, “Homage to Cezanne,” evokes the fearful, wonder­ ful image of our historical past in a richly human and earthy counterpart to the stupendous Rose of Dante’s Paradiso, with its myriad saved souls fly­ ing in and out like bees in the petals of a flower. Wright seems to say that, striving to live in reality, we try to make our impossible break with the past, yet continue to perform the lives of the dead, unable to let go, “hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in our hearts.” Five of nine poems in section two of four parts are titled “Self Portrait.” Each poem asseverates the sensuous reality of physical time and place, over which the dead still preside, and the living join hands “that when the birds start none of us is missing. Hold hands, hold hands.” The twenty lyrics of Part Three contemplate the emptiness of death: “The souls of the day’s dead fly up like birds, big sister. The sky shutters and casts loose And faster than stars the body goes to the earth. ... I want to complete my flesh and sit in a quiet corner Untied from God, where the dead don’t sing in their sleep.” It is the long title poem which dominates, sharpens his Weltanschauung. Sixteen pages of brilliant, poignant lines defining the world of a modem intellectual in...

Secret Go the Wolves by R. D. Lawrence

Reviews 313 The same themes, augmented by a larger historical context, inform The Right Madness on Skye. While writing on the Isle of Skye, Hugo is conscious of the lasting monuments of historical fact in Scotland’s “sad long history” : Viking invasions, defeats by the English, the Stuart rebellion, the Highland clearances, the enduring poverty of crofters. These are facts — “the way it has to be” — standing like those neolithic brocs or strange Stonehenge-like monoliths. But this harsh realism mixes with romance — a blend of spirits Hugo has always preferred — and the songs echo in the Skye mists, “Pipe the dead Gaels back for one more dance,” and stories materialize which take monsters more serioasly than mere projections of human dysfunction which technology can solve. Hugo wants to make, and in this book mightily succeeds in making, a poetry that lasts, which has its roots in assonance and rhyme and dance and the essential emotions and connections and losses of our lives. In “Letter to Garber from Skye” he takes the Highland saying, “the fate of the Gael is to lose everything,” and shows us our loss at losing the Gael. On this frontier outpost of Europe, similar to his own Northwest frontier, Hugo knows with deep understanding that the endurance of song as poetry depends upon the continued presence of “the autonomous man” who knows his silence inside, who has tested his “capacity for hate” and has seen “how bad it can be.” And the continued presence of that man of under­ standing, Hugo’s poetry implies, depends on poetry enduring as song. And so there is a curious mix in these poems of the romantically lyrical and the hard fact, of Skye mist and Callanish stone. Hugo assumes he is part of the past, one of the stones, and in the title poem takes the stance that he is already dead, then turns his death march into a jig. Therein lies the “right madness” : knowing how to create feeling out of defeat, letting stones sing in wind, making the dispossession of history a source of strength. Hugo has raised poems durable in their song: the singer’s voice dissolves in wind but the words stand in the rain for years. MICHAEL ALLEN, Ball State University Secret Go the Wolves. By R. D. Lawrence. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. 277 pages, $10.95.) This book relates the author’s experiences with two wolf pups pulled from a bloody sack in the bottom of a Cree Indian’s canoe rescued from Ontario’s Mattawa River when its occupant — a little the worse for whiskey — had allowed himself and his canoe to get caught in the river’s rapids. They were wrapped in their mother’s gory hide where the Cree had placed them, soaked in water and blood, barely ten inches long, and quite blind. Naturalist Lawrence paid the Indian twenty-five dollars and a canoe paddle for the male and female pups, whom he dubbed “Matta” and “Wa” after the river from which they had been rescued. 314 Western American Literature Thus began an amazing adventure for Lawrence, his wife Joan, and their malamute dog Tundra, in raising and caring for two animals that Lawrence vowed would someday return to their wilderness habitat. Before the pups would give their farewell howl in the wilderness after eighteen months of civilization, there would follow the author’s sham regurgitation in simulation of their mother’s weaning process, their first frightening night in the woods, their first response howls, their encounters with other creatures of the wild, and their first deer kill. Lawrence describes in great detail his and his wife’s procedures in preparing the pups for the inevitable parting, and their necessary vigilance in keeping wolves and wolf-hating neighbors apart. Naturalist Lawrence has added much to wolflore, and along the way, provides the reader with many anecdotes of more than twenty years of north woods experience. Lawrence is a satisfying and very competent writer. He was born in Vigo, Spain, and was educated partly in that country and partly in England. Twenty-five years ago he moved to Canada, and now lives on 200 wilderness acres...

Vienna Blood & other poems by Jerome Rothenberg, and: To the Natural World by Genevieve Taggard, and: Water and Stone by R. G. Vliet, and: Country Boy by Max Westbrook

Reviews 315 Vienna Blood & other poems. By Jerome Rothenberg. (New York: New Directions, 1980. 90 pages, $4.95.) To the Natural World. By Genevieve Taggard. (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1980. 61 pages, $2.50.) Water and Stone. By R. G. Vliet. (New York: Random House, 1980. 98 pages, $5.95.) Country Boy. By Max Westbrook. (Austin, Texas: Thorp Springs Press, 1979. 53 pages, $3.00.) These four diverse volumes share several traits long identified with western American poetry: a strong sense of place, effective use of images, and an identifiable particular voice. While western locale is obvious in the situations, images, and diction of Max Westbrook’s poems, it is less so in those of Jerome Rothenberg. Genevieve Taggard’s locales are wide ranging, as the divisions suggest: I. Hawaii; II. Washington State and California; III. New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts; IV. Antibes (France), Capri (Italy), and Mallorca (Spain) ; and V. Vermont. R. G. Vliet’s poems, too, generate from various locales: New York, Mexico, Texas. Jewish heritage, Indian mythology, friends, family, and numerology all lie behind Rothenberg’s poems. Some of the poems seem self-conscious, distant from the earth, hinting of the cardboard grasshopper W. D. Howells warned of. Several present the harsh paradoxes of the West: “Sutter’s Gold” or “ ‘The Jew of Malta’” (Malta, Montana). Among the best selections is the longer poem “Abulafia’s Circles,” each word of the title emblematic of both mystic theme and the form of the poem. “The Struc­ tural Study of Myth” demonstrates the force with which Rothenberg interfuses myths. The poem ends old Trickster brother of Jesus didn’t us Jews tell stories of his magic “because we are like him” the Crow Indian had said about Coyote hitting the nail at last. The collection of poems by the late Genevieve Taggard compiled by her daughter is a welcome resurrection of imagistic and rhythmic beauty. The bobwhite and western meadowlark and the tropical odors of algaroba, honey, and mangoes enrich themes of love, beauty, and fear. Innocent simplicity may lead to vibrant intensity as in the short poem “Spring Touch” which begins with “wobbling lambs” in “tender-mad meadows” and ends with the lines — I Sweet to your thigh Take the new tingle of the froth of seeds. 316 Western American Literature She does not ignore the fear of loss (“Monologue for Mothers”) or the despair at being inundated by the rising “waters of desolation.” Still, restorative nature offers the “echo-pure” sounds of birds in “Gilfeather pasture” and “the cactus and asphodel and olive” of a Mediterranean island where the “outrageous wrongs men do lessen, diminish.” Vliet’s stylistically varied poems of life and death all share a fortunate dependence upon imagery. The longest poem, “Passage,” is composed of imagistic personal vignettes of a life of molding sense impressions into art. In another, shorter, poem the “pain of a boy’s / eternal present” contrasts with the “loneliness / of dwindling curtains waiting in the still air.” The finely wrought title poem “Water and Stone” (written in the style of a Japanese No drama) presents reactions to a young boy’s drowning; and in “Salvos for Albertito” a man dies in and is symbolized by a world of sugar cane. In the short poem “Preface” Westbrook states his desire to find in wife, children and country land a song the damned could sing and lovers hear. The vigor of vernacular and local color artifact contribute to the successful poems prompted by that desire. He portrays a world where one takes “pot luck” for a place to die, but where love transcends to wife, brother, God. And something reaches beyond the limits of actuality, making natural places (a waterfall perhaps) become special places where one can feel what it is to touch the world in love and fear, ready to jump and run. Each of the above volumes, while of varying importance to Western literature,demonstrates the control of language to limn the varied tones of felt life. In this endeavor R. G. Vliet rivals the best of artists. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University ...

John Ashbery: The Effort to Make Sense

John Ashbery: The Effort to Make Sense · David Fite It has been customary to approach the perilous matter of meaning with a tidy dichotomy: words have their referents and they have their senses. Ordinary discourse proposes a happy marriage ofthe two, if only because most people are anxious to make themselves understood, and quickly. Thus, we have another felicitous betrothal: linguists note the reality principle—the speaker intends to make both sense and reference for us and the cooperative principle—the speaker has no desire to irritate us with untoward entropie meanderings. Poetry is, of course, another matter. The poet, fancying himself a seer, or at least a quester after keener demarcations, is pleased to render his syntax, his meanings, the very sound and sight of his language problematic, and this all for our greater good; truth, we are meant to see, is not easy, and we had better learnto accept the charity of whatever hard moments are given us. Poets have never been cooperative, but it has usually been a comfort in the twentieth century to know that, with sustained application, we could at least invoke the spirit of Western cause-and-effect rationality to explicate the poetic vagaries away, deliver them unto a comprehensible network of sense and reference. Symbolist poets may have a hot line to the deep, but it is a deep with a most fetching similitude to the architecture ofthe latest issue ofPMLA . The New Critics termed all this the irony of texture. The poetry of John Ashbery cannot properly be said to participate in such an irony. It is a poetry so fundamentally serious about the keener demarcations of consciousness as that consciousness encounters the protean objects of itself and of the world that its readers are finally left shorn of most of the crutches of modern critical convention. This is the intent of the poet. An Ashbery prose piece from 1966 reveals an absence of sympathy for the bewildered: the poet speaks of a "mania for over-interpretation" known as "objective correlativitis"; he is almost certain that the elm trees of New England are the carriers.1 Instead of complex networks of symbols, we will get in Ashbery's poetry what he calls, in a laudatory 1962 review of the poetry of Pierre Reverdy, a world of images "transparente, sans 'signification philosophique,' " a world fresh with perception of "phénomènes vivants," a world that we see as iffor the first time— "un paysage naturel."2 There is nothing easy about such a world; Ashbery does not mean by natural landscape what Hugh Kenner means whenhe speaks of quiddity in the poetry of Williams or Pound. Ashbery does not just provide a celebration of things as the visual eye tells itself they are: the streaks on a tulip, the cat climbing into the flowerpot. If anything, his aesthetic is closer to theperiplum advanced by Pound in the Pisan Cantos, a flux of experiential consciousness as seen by no map, but the difference is that Pound, after all, still had his eye on the map. Unlike the The Missouri Review · 123 frustrated pedagogue Pound, Ashbery is almost continuously successful in his attempts to avoid giving us a guided tour of anything, mind or world. The actuating faith behind Ashbery's poetry is succinctly expressed in a "Poem in Three Parts," from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: "One must bear in mind one thing./It isn't necessary to know what that thing is./All things are palpable, none are known." It is no accident that this observation is couched in the "Love" section of the poem; Ashbery is enamored of the epistemology rife with all the ambiguities here presented. In the title poem of the same volume, a masterful extended rumination in the romantic tradition on the meaning of the ordering imagination of the artist, Ashbery makes explicit this connection between love and meaning: we know of love: ...that its windings Lead nowhere except to further tributaries And that these empty themselves into a vague Sense of something that can never be known Even though it seems likely that each of us Knows what it is and is capable of Communicating it to...

Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society by Northrop Frye

490 NOTES 1 T.S. Eliot, "What Is Minor Poetry," On Poetry and Poets (London 1957), p 46. 2 Selected Essays (New York 1950), pp 170-71. 3 For example, in the essay "What is Minor Poetry," we find Eliot saying: "We seem, so far to have arrived at the tentative conclusion that, whatever a minor poet may be, a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it." On Poetry and Poets, p 4 7 4 Selected Essays, p 179. 5 On Poetry and Poets, p 47. 6 Selected Essays, p 179. 7 T.S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in The Philosophy ofF.H. Bradley, edited with notes and A Selected Bibliography by Anne C. Bolgan (London 1964). See especially Eliot's concluding chapter. 8 Selected Essays, p 368. 9 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York 1971), p 322. 10 Ibid, p 322. 11 Ibid, p 427. 12 In his "Eliot and F.H. Bradley: an account," Wollheim remarks that "Eliot, in the pursuit of a certain kind of security or reassurance that we are in no position to define, was progressively led to substitute, in his mind, on the one hand, ideas of less content for ideas of more content, and, on the other hand, poorer or softer ideas for better and stronger ideas." Eliot in Perspective, ed. Graham Martin (London 1970), p 190. 13 T.S. Eliot, "In Memory of Henry James," The Egoist, 5 (January 1918J, 2. an n e c. bo lgan / University of Western Ontario Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). xviii, 296. $11.5 0 At times I find it pleasant to entertain the perspective by incongruity of an analogy between Northrop Frye's writings since Fearful Symmetry (1947) and Robert Frost's New Hampshire. New Hampshire followed its title poem, an informal cultural-spiritual-critical topology of considerable length, with a series of separate poems called " n o tes" that develop to some length topics suggested in the title poem, these followed in turn by a set of more lyric " grace n o tes." The poem "New Hampshire" originally had literal footnotes to the "notes" and "grace notes" that followed. Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) has yet to acquire such footnotes, but every reader of Frye's writings will have a growing awareness of the elaborate relation between Frye's central anatomy of our approaches to literary study and his other books of continuous discourse ("notes") and separate essays ("grace notes"). I hope Frye, in whose writings precise musical analogy plays so large a part, might accept these informal analogues for what he has described, in Spiritus Mundi, as a "spiral curriculum, circling around the same issues, though trying to keep them open-ended" (p 100). The following pages will make clear, I trust, that these Frostian analogies are in no way reductive. 4 9 i Frye's most recent note - at the time I am writing - is The Secular Scripture (1976), to be reviewed elsewhere in e s c . His most recent gathering of grace notes is Spiritus Mundi (1976). Frye tells us in his "Preface" that this title was originally suggested for Fables of Identity (1963), implying the thematic and structural continuity of these two collections and an intervening one, The Stubborn Structure (1970). Frye, again in the "Preface," describes the basic pattern of this continuity by dividing the twelve essays that follow into three groups: "general issues related to literary criticism ... general issues within literary criticism itself ... more specific criticism of authors" (p vii). The full sub-titles of the collections of 1963, 1970, and 1976 suggest an exfoliating pattern both synchronic and diachronic or, to use Frye's less cumbersome terms, both a meaning and a narrative. The very title Spiritus Mundi provides a resonant image of the anagogic source or goal of all of Frye's writings, whatever their particular occasion or emphasis. "Part Three: four po ets" takes up single aspects of "authors who have turned up constantly in my writing" (p vii), not surprisingly Milton, Blake, Yeats, and Stevens. In four...

Cumberland Station by Dave Smith

Reviews 329 Cumberland Station. By Dave Smith. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. 94 pages, $7.95.) One-third through Cumberland Station one is ready to say this is a thought-style, a dianoia, rare as Roethke’s and Whitman’s, and as greatly needed. These two poets, mentioned in his poems with reverence, have in common with Dave Smith the enormous compassion which keeps them from the solipsist vulgarity, the sly self-pity, which shuts off the valves of our attention because it betrays not true artist power but too often a vapid weakness of spirit. Read the poem about the child who on her fourth birth­ day, in her polio braces, was given the birthday gift of death in a nest of cotton-mouths, and you cannot close those valves. Read the title poem, “Cumberland Station.” You will want to go on into the book to realize the man behind the professor. Part Two of the collection contains some prolixity, some slack tension, and one or two poems wherein the language drops from powerful under­ statement to a bathetic exploitation of shock words one does not expect a first-order poet to need. Dave Smith does not need shock or disproportioned language or imagery and proves it. “The Testimony of Wine” is incredibly skillful. The handicaps of personification, sermon, obvious symbolism are transcended by an unobtrusive but sure musicality in the mythopoeia.. Was it Yeats who said that what is true has its own distinctive music? Perhaps Valery, who recognized the manner in which true utterances seek their perfect vocabu­ lary and inflections. “One Question, Two Seasons” is an elegy, and as many of the poems are elegiac whether or not they describe death, it should be read for the central theme of love which the writer does not get away from in any poem of this book. I don’t care that you died, I want to keep alive the love you made good in me So who can tell me how to stop dreaming those bones charred by cold, the frame of the stripped skin the absence of eyeholes? I must give over grief and begin in the winter I love to love whatever believes in the good. Closing part two is a long poem “Drunks,” describing a visit to the Rehabili­ tation Center, subtly but surely pointing at the tragic non-communication which makes return to society impossible to some addicts. The counselor said few graduate for good. Graduate from what, you asked, but you were done and so was he. This is the kind of poetry that can only rise out of deep spiritual reserves, 330 Western American Literature telling the thought-style of the man Rousseau, if not such himself, believed we most need. A few lines from “Some Good Luck in Lightfoot,” part three, will give an idea of the relationship of thought and craft. Mostly she was locked up good and he would talk as we wandered up the tiny stairs and walked through the gallery of girls she sketched on sheets and tacked to the eaves. He shook his head for the purity of what she made, although she dreamed plain: each girl wore green as she did, the rent streak of the crayon blurring into the hubs of spinning wheels always there, and legs skewed out like bad-cut boards and faces facing to a window hardly more than a butter smear. Two weeks I heard him whisper through the hole in his throat The neighbors must not know or else they’d think being crazy’s just the joke the artist plays. As serious as if he’d laid a knife on a hog’s throat he swore that art was the only thing that mattered in this moony world. You saw it? Didn’t you see it! Upstairs she thumped her boards and drooled When I left he warned me to keep away from the James and I have done the best I can in a hundred towns where no one took me home to keep me living. You would be wrong to think I do not love the way that woman soared in shades of green...

Robinson Jeffers Today: Beyond Good and Beneath Evil

O`N MARCH 3, 194I, Robinson Jeffers read from his poetry a %-J large audience in Emerson Hall, Harvard University. room seated four hundred, but many more crowded the halls outside. next day I drove Jeffers visit Emerson's Concord and Walden Pond, and in conversation inquired the title of his next book. Beyond Good and Evil, he replied; and when I did not hear well, he added: Nietzsche. Nine months later his new book bore the title, Be Angry at the Sun; and on December 7 Pearl Harbor exploded. At that time the incident did not seem very important. title poem of the new volume translated the Nietzschean idea into poetic language, while it recalled the German of Spengler (mentioned in another poem), whose Untergang des Abendlandes announced the setting sun of all Western civilization. But after Pearl Harbor the new volume seemed almost treasonous: one poem coupled with Hitler as equal instigators of the new world war: Roosevelt by grandiose good intentions, cajolery / And public funds, . . . Hitler by fanatic / Patriotism, frank lies, genius and terror. This seemed too much. When The Bowl of Blood sought imagine Hitler as a kind of tragic hero, in order to present contemporary things in the shape of eternity, most people stopped reading Jeffers. Now more than a generation later, 1941 looms as a watershed in American history. But it also marks a watershed in the history of Jeffers's reputation. In March, 1941, his popularity had reached its highest point (although some critics had been denouncing him since the publication of Women at Point Sur in 1927). But after Pearl Harbor his attempts argue that The cause is far beyond good and evil, / Men fight and their cause is not the effectively destroyed his reputation. At the very moment when Americans most needed believe in the absolute goodness of their cause, Jeffers

H. D.'s "Hermetic Definition": The Poet as Archetypal Mother

Fortunately, the exclusive association of H.D. with the imagist movement is over. A larger awareness of the range of her prose and verse developed with the publication of Tribute to Freud (1956), the novel Bid Me to Live (1960), and the long poem Helen in Egypt, which appeared in 1961, the year of her death.' This awareness has continued to grow, thanks to recent new editions of some of her post-imagist work2 and the publication of Definition (1972), containing three new poems.3 Thus far, these new poems-Hermetic Definition, Sagesse, and Winter Love-have received little attention. Admittedly they are difficult: elliptical, personal, and imbued with mythology and spiritualism. But they also have the compelling power of self-possession and fervor that H.D.'s work always shows. In the hope of stimulating discussion of these poems, this essay is devoted to the longest of the three, the title poem, Hermetic Definition, completed in 1961. It may be the last poem she wrote;

Who Buried H. D.? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in "The Literary Tradition"

is A MAJOR TWENTIETH-CENTURY POET who all too often receives the response H.D.?-who's he? When people are reminded that H.D. was the pen name for Hilda Doolittle, it is generally remembered that she was one of those imagist poets back in the beginning of the century who changed the course of modern poetry with their development of the image and free verse. Her early poems, like Oread or Heat, still appear regularly in modern poetry anthologies, but the more difficult epic poetry she went on to write is seldom studied or taught. The canon of her major, largely unread work is considerable: The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) are the three long poems of her war Trilogy, which has recently been reissued; Helen in Egypt (1961) is the work she called her own Cantos; the newly published volume Hermetic Definition (1972) contains three more long poems, the title poem, Winter Love, and Sagesse; and Vale Ave is another, as-yet-unpublished epic poem. While poetry was undoubtedly the genre giving fullest expression to her creative energies, she also published numerous translations, acted in a movie whose script she wrote (Borderline, with Paul Robeson, 1930), experimented with drama (Hippolytus Temporizes, 1927), and wrote several novels (Hedylus, 1928; Palimpsest, 1926; Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal), 1960; and the largely unpublished The Gift), interesting at the very least for her own style of rendering stream of consciousness. Her memoir of Freud, Tribute to Freud (1956), is both an impressionistic record of their sessions together and a serious reevaluation of his impact on the twentieth century; it too has been recently reissued in expanded form. Caged in a literary movement that lasted all of six or seven years, the magnificent poet of these epics and the writer who experimented in a wide variety of genres is like the captured white-faced Scops owl in her poem Sagesse. While the onlookers at the zoo chatter about his comical whiskers and

Francis Webb’s ‘Sturt and the Vultures’ : A Note on Sources

Francis Webb's interest in Australian explorers has been a continuing one and he has found material tor his major poetic sequences in their characters and in their careers. In 1947 the Bulletin printed his 'Leichhardt Pantomime'; this was subsequently revised and published as the title poem of the volume Leichhardt in Theatre in 1952. 'Eyre All Alone' followed in 1961. That his interest hasnot diminished is apparent from his poem 'Sturt and the Vultures', which appear ed in the last issue of Meanjin Quarterly for 1970.

Passage to Less than India: Structure and Meaning in Whitman's “Passage to India”

THE GREAT APPEAL of “Passage to India” is understandable. Following the Civil War and the publication of the 1867 (fourth) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman, close to fifty, had become increasingly preoccupied in his poetry with “thoughts on the deep themes of Death & Immortality.” While he had, of course, explored these themes in his earlier poetry, this strong emphasis on the “universal” was something new and it was to continue to the end of his career. He answered a request from the English Broadway Magazine for a poem by sending five separate lyrics, under the group title “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” Published in 1868, these were, in addition to the title poem, “Darest Thou Now ? Soul,” “The Last Invocation,” “Pensive and Faltering,” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” which was actually composed in 1862–63 and reworked at this time with emphasis on the soul rather than on its earlier “Calamus” motif. Quite self-conscious about the spiritual direction his poetry was taking now, he indicated that he would make “no more attempts at smart sayings, or scornful criticisms, or harsh comments on persons or actions, or private and public affairs . . . never attempt puns or plays upon words, or utter sarcastic comments.” And around this time he also indicated that in the next edition of Leaves he would give special emphasis to “religious themes.”1 Whitman was entering the final phase of his career. He had come the full way around. In some dozen years, the poet of the body had given way to the poet of the soul, the poet of intense nationalism to the poet of internationalism and the cosmic.

Bedding the Locale

Social Darwinian optimism assesses a poet in terms of his ‘advance’ or ‘development’—thus the conventional blurb’s claim that Seamus Heaney’s ‘power is, if anything, stronger than before’. The immodesty of Faber’s claim might obscure one’s sense that something more subtle, and less inevitably even, is taking place in Heaney’s third book. The book shows, for instance, the elements in his work as he assimilates himself into a variety of forms and tones of voice, some of which are modish, others achieved deftly but with creditable hesitation. In Death of a Naturalist, the title poem indicated Heaney’s capacity to formulate that revulsion which seems to be a fairly basic constituent of man’s relation to nature; (of the ‘gross- bellied frogs’).

The Unitive Urge in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

I SHALL never get you put together entirely, frets the scrubgirl who scrambles over the gigantic ruins in the title poem of Sylvia Plath's first volume, Colossus. Although the poem primarily concerns the poet's obsession with her longdead father, her love that is mostly hate and her desire that is mostly deathwish, The also assigns the chore of her poetry: cleaning up and piecing together fragments, debris, to make something immaculate, superhuman, and whole. Read as continuum and totality, the poems of Colossus and her second volume, A riel, tell of Plath's attempt to reconcile guilty, mortal history (her own and humanity's) with some pure, immortal, perpetual moment. things of this life-man's ignorant destruction of the earth even while he dependently wallows in it, the mass murders of Dachau, Auschwitz, and Belsen, the sinister threats of the atomic bomb and radioactive fallout, and the unearthly devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-all troubled her sight. look into her own mirror, a gaze more and more brutally honest as she aged, also disturbed her as she discovered a wildly irrational hatred for her father, Otto Emil Plath, a German-born entomologist, resentment for her husband, British poet Ted Hughes, and their children,

A Thaw on Snowy River

In brief, 'The Man from Snowy River' seems to possess none of those attributes whereby a critic might justify its wide and continued popularity. Judith Wright's approach to the poem is now perhaps the most usual one. Often it is an attitude that is implied rather than stated, for many critics unexpectedly refrain from commenting on the poem at all. Yet it was the title poem of a collection that was, and still is, remarkably successful. While a few critics have been prepared to assert that Paterson has something worthwhile to offer and that 'The Man from Snowy River' is one of his best poems, perhaps the most outstanding feature of the extant criticism is an apparent unwillingness to comment upon the text of this poem.

Songs of my Divided Self by L. W. Michaelson, and: Running Lucky by R. P. Dickey

Reviews 79 Songs of my Divided Self. By L. W. Michaelson. (Fort Smith, Arkansas: South and West, 1969. 43 pages, $2.75.) Running Lucky. By R. P. Dickey. (Chicago: The Swallow Press Inc., 1969. 80 pages, $5.00.) Reading L. W. Michaelson poems in the journals, I have found myself thoroughly delighted with the fact that here is a poet who has read other writers and can make them part of his own world. But when these poems are put together in one cover, one gets a slight sinking feeling—it’s all so damned literary. But then one comes back: So it’s literary? And, no, it isn’t literary— the man is not a pedant. There is something more. For it is only when one sees the poems together that he realizes how much Michaelson is “using” these quotations, allusions, literary echoes: Michaelson is a committed man, not a “political, true, and thank God, but a man who loves the natural world and human beings and it seeking the most exact way of both affirming the love and attacking those who would deny other human being and/or the natural; the allusions are often witty, often savage, but always for a purpose. Consider these lines from the “Letter to J. Swift, Reformer”: “We still don’t eat babies;/We put fall-out in their milk instead.” Or the nicely satirical transmogrification of Emily Dickinson’s “debauchee of dew” into “debauchee/of dew-drop diamond brooches” in “How to Write a Love Poem for a Magazine that Runs an Ad for a $68,000 Necklace.” And Frost’s love for nature informs Michaelson’s “Whose picnic grounds these are/I think I know;/But, then, I’d rather watch them/Fill with snow/Than with ‘turistas’ that I know.” But there are other things not “satirical” in the common sense, such as the remarkable “Postscript to Letter No. 9” of Hector St. John Crevecoeur: “I fired once and the dark birds were gone:/So were the Darkie’s eyes.” Crevecoeur supplied the original story; Michaelson has made it into an even more profound protest against racism. In short, these are often deeply felt, well wrought, and more than often very funny poems. R. P. Dickey, younger, less given to the “literary,” more given to the confessional, is, so, more contemporary and more expert, but oddly more orthodox than Michaelson. In the review copy of Dickey’s book that I received, someone had left a piece of paper on which he’d begun to note the subject matters of the sections: I, sexual; II, natural; III, social-historical . . . . These “classifications” have their point: the poems are very conscious of themselves. Nevertheless, I like a crafted poem and these are—the work of a man with a poet’s ear, a poet’s eye, a man who wants to talk of the artist’s irreducible subject, the single human being in his own life. Still, the very precision of the poems makes it had to describe them, makes it hard to quote from them; they 80 Western American Literature need to be seen whole. In “Photograph for Gail,” the “I” speaks of the girl standing “behind the capitol in Jefferson City,” and says he’ll not give up his dream, her, for “look what I got./I’U commemorate, . . ./order to be cast statues of you, empress . . . .” But such a quote does not give the taste of the poem. Or to cite the last line from the title poem, “I’m running lucky,” is to risk suggesting that the poems are flat, but, no, the poem builds to that state­ ment and it has weight, but only after one has read the whole poem. Still, there are beginnings, middles, striking lines in themselves here, quoteable lines: “In this lovely scuffle for sex/and care/how do guys in wheelchairs/score?” And there is the more than good “For Delmore Schwartz,” this lovely praise of a man and a poet which I wish I had room to quote entire: “as things in celebrations/his sword chiseled out from/fifty-two turns toward release/and one about a bear’s/become a masterpiece...

The Critical Reception of Tennyson's “Maud”

In midsummer 1855 the announcement that Alfred Tennyson would soon publish a new work stirred the reading public with eager expectancy. He was acknowledged to be the foremost living English poet and had worn the bays as Victoria's laureate for almost five years. His new volume was awaited, wrote one reviewer, with much of the avid anticipation that had attended the productions of Scott and Byron. Yet it is generally said that when Maud, and Other Poems appeared on 28 July 1855, there was serious dissatisfaction with the title poem. Indeed, it has become a commonplace of literary history that “Maud” was vociferously condemned by the British periodical press, and Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet's latest biographer, writes, “Poor Maud was received with almost universal reprobation.” But John O. Eidson main-tains, with some evidence to support his claim, that “the British criticism of ‘Maud’ was rather sharply divided,” and Amy Cruse unqualifiedly asserts that the poem “was received with tremendous enthusiasm.” In view of the conflicting testimony it seems valuable to determine as accurately as possible the critical reaction to “Maud” and also to examine its effect upon Tennyson's revision of the poem and upon his decision to proceed with the Idylls of the King.