AMERICAN VOICES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 787, 20 August 1954, Page 12

AMERICAN VOICES

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MODERN AMERICAN VERSE, edited by Geoffrey Moore; Penguin Books, 3/6. |t is good news that an anthology of modern American poetry has now come within easy reach of the pocket of the ordinary reader. After Carlos Williams’s Little Treasury of Modern Poetry. there is no other book of this kind to present a varied and adequate selection from this complex field. Ignoring the smoke-screen of factional argument which American critics have themselves put up, one can distinguish three main lines of development-the "Here is America" approach, deriving from

author of the Spoon River Anthology; the "Court poetry without a _ court," written, though not exclusively, by Southern poets; and the "scientific language" of Karl Shapiro and many other recent poets. It would seem _ that America presents her poets with too little and*too much: a wealth of crises and a dearth of stable notions of God, society and themselves, by which these crises could be linked and interpreted. Thus comes the paradox, recurrent throughout these poems, of a social optimistic myth coupled with an intensely negative personal view of life. Shapiro writesS ae a we have seen that when the hero The poll of his helmet to the gaze Of the ecstatic myth-mad populace That it is nothing but a shell, a voice Without a face, a brash and neutral horn That amplifies our disappointing hopes .. . One has the sense of a skeleton in a closet and poets too erudite to know the simple words that could pulverise it or bring it to life again. Perhaps the Southern poets are the most fortunate, who have ready to hand a Homeric myth, anti-urban, the old hates and blood-guilts of the Civil War. The elder and more formal poets impress me most (Frost, Robinson, Eliot, Crowe Ran-som)-not on account of their technical competence (some of the younger have them there on the hip), but by simple evocative diction and a sense of continuity in the natural world and in the lives of men. Their work has its distinctive American tang; but they seem, happily, to have paid little attention to critics trying to write their poems for

them.

James K.

Baxter