Singing Youngsters

THEORY OF FLIGHT--Muriel Rukcyser --Yale University Press ($2).

POEMS--Robert Fitzgerald--Arrow Editions ($2).

The first published prose of young U. S. writers is carefully watched by such editors as Edward O'Brien, who collects anthologies of short stories and usually discovers at least one promising new author out of each season's crop. But poets are generally condemned to sing in the solitude of small magazines, unknown except to other poets, for long periods before their work receives the limited critical attention devoted to poetry in U. S. literary publications.

Last week two volumes of good verse clearly revealed the type of subject and the general moods that these younger talents are expressing. Although neither poet offered individual poems sufficiently finished and organized to stand independently in the memory, both submitted work that gave the impression of potential power and both displayed a striving for originality of expression that often resulted in bold and effective imagery. Even readers who find little contemporary poetry of interest could confidently take the two books as representative of two important widely-separated, vaguely-defined movements operating in the imaginations of the youngest writers.

Now 21, Muriel Rukeyser was born in New York, attended Vassar, Columbia and the Roosevelt School of the Air, where she gathered material for the title poem in Theory of Flight. In his preface. Stephen Vincent Benet describes her as essentially an urban poet, her mind "fed on the quick jerk of the newsreel, the hard lights in the sky, the long deserted night-street, the take-off of the plane from the ground." The book contains 15 ''Poems Out of Childhood," the long "Theory of Flight," 14 short pieces that range from glimpses of a cinema and a burlesque show to a defiance of Washington. "City of Monuments." Muriel Rukeyser is "a Left Winger and a revolutionary," but her poetry contains no direct appeals to the proletariat and her symbols of revolt are imaginative. The world of which she writes is chaotic, bloody, violent, filled with crimes of perversity, such as are suggested by a recollection of Loeb & Leopold: how they removed his glasses and philosophically slit his throat. Man's conquest of nature, primarily his conquest of space, is symbolized by quotations from the notes of the Wright brothers, by technical discussions of flight, by a glimpse of a young aviator awakening. These are contrasted, in a sequence whose pattern is not clear, with scenes of the horrors of modern society--a lynching, a poetic evocation of the trial of the Scottsboro Negroes. The mood of spiritual desolation expressed in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and echoed by a thousand imitators has no place or significance in this world. On the contrary, the poet gives an impression of eagerness and determination in facing the experiences of contemporary life, even the most brutal, and making a passionate effort to understand them and incorporate them into her verse. Consequently, although her work is often confused, Theory of Flight is a suggestive book that seems to promise a durable career for its author.

Robert Fitzgerald's Poems are much smoother and more conventional in form. His themes are often familiar--his Boston poems include a "Charles River Nocturne," glimpses of the Common--and he writes of autumn woods and winter nights. A dominant note in his poems is loneliness, but it is a loneliness the poet accepts without regret, and it is enriched with memories of childhood, with grave and unpretentious reflections on destiny and death, with flashes of warmly human or amusingly discordant scenes that the world offers for his attention. Cool and detached, the poems give little evidence of intellectual curiosity. Robert Fitzgerald can write vividly of boys playing marbles in a yard, speculating without passion or anger on their fates--one becoming a dealer in jewels and watches, another grown ruddy from "sunning in the South." He can interrupt these reflections with strange asides that suggest the unpredictable quality of his imagination: How earth pulls us and pulls the moon Our bones know casually.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.