INTELLECTUAL FIDGETING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 726, 12 June 1953, Page 13

INTELLECTUAL FIDGETING

SELECTED POEMS, by Wallace Stevens; Faber and Faber. English price, 12/6. HIS’ handsomely printed volume illustrates clearly the fact that while Faber have chosen their English poets mainly on merit, they have chosen their American poets solely on reputation, Not that Mr. Stevens’s volume is dead wood from cover to cover, like the recently-published collection of the works of the redoubtable Robert Lowell; but one would much rather have seen Edna St. Vincent (continued on next page): t

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(continued trom previous page) Millay, Robert Frost, John Crowe Ran"some, or a selection from Karl Shapiro, in the Faber series than this lamentable and feathery ostrich-rump. How Mr. Stevens has apparently been able to hide his head since 1923 in the sands of a private discussion whether reality is real or not, and continue to feel that he is purifying the dialect of the tribe, one finds it difficult to imagine. His "misuse of words is constant and mon--otonously uniform. The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. s it move to and fro or is it of both At once? Is it a luminous. flittering _ Or the concentration of a cloudy day? Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? There’s a meditation there, in which there seems To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or Not apprehended well. Does the poet Evade us, as in a senseless element.

_ He may well ask. His own verse, of which this extract is typical, has a convincing manner and the thinnest of matter. A poetry which is in essence an _ intellectual fidgeting cannot have lasting __ significance. Mr. Stevens’s practice derives from his aesthetic creed--that a poet need only go through the © spiritual gymnastics of hitching himself up by his own boot-strings in order to speak cogently, em_phatically and _ truth-

fully. It would be difficult to say politely how much one disagrees.

James K.

Baxter