Poeticules

BEFORE THE BRAVE--Kenneth Patchen --Random House ($2). SWEAR BY THE NIGHT--Nathalia Crane --Random House ($1.50). Mere mention of poetry makes most men itch. Not until poetry the thing has been sent again & again to the critical laundry would most self-respecting readers wear it next to their skins. Modern poets have always raised a storm of apprehensive, defensive abuse. Wordsworth was condemned for his prosiness, Whitman for his barbaric yawp, Browning for his obscurity. But readers of 1936 think they have a better case against their poets than more ancient moderns did against theirs. Nervous readers, cornered and made to listen to the spoutings of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, might fall asleep or get angry, but they would not understand more than a line or so in a dozen. Many a present-day poet along with many a poetaster and poeticule, follows the modern fad of writing a subjective Sanskrit all his own. Ponderers of such puzzle-poetry as Kenneth Patchen's no longer hope to get more than an impression of the sense; they do not so much read as search for clues. But even nervous readers will find enough of those to lead them to an opinion: 1) Patchen's language dates him as definitely as a Eugenie bonnet: These withered times prepare no turkish-bath. . . . We can't get there by taxicab or sentiment. . . . Glory squashed in the hinge of a history. . . . 2) When lucidly emotional he writes an angry Letter to a Policeman in Kansas City. 3) When not making experimental "statements," he hymns the Revolution. 4) He knows when he has created such a mighty line as We hear the dark curve of eternity go coughing down the hills. Net result of these clues: the no-longer-so-nervous reader forms the opinion that Kenneth Patchen is a poeticule. Twelve years ago Nathalia Crane was a child prodigy. Only daughter of an unremarkable Brooklyn couple, she published her first book of "poetry" (The Janitor's Boy) when she was 10. Thereafter, in fairly rapid succession, she wrote and published three more books of verse, a stilted novel. An unknown benefactor offered to send her abroad and put her through college if she would not publish anything more until after graduation. Last week, now 22 and a graduate of Columbia University's Barnard College, onetime Prodigy Nathalia Crane published her fifth book of poems. They still read like the writings of a precocious little girl. Her nicest ideas are pretty cute: what if a sailing ship were loaded with honey and the ghosts of the bees that made it stung the crew to death? What if the silk worms, roses, bees went on strike? What if Manhattan's pigeons were all killed? Miss Crane is fond of alliteration's artful aid: "Clerk and crier quaffed the quiet of the quarry." When she feels like it, she can rhyme "thorn" with "faun," play hob with King's College English. Readers who like lilt will find plenty of it, in the great tradition of Robert W. Service and Edgar A. Guest:

The Wise Men still are with us and as wonderful today As on that ancient morning by a cradle lined with hay. They hand us not the incense or the precious oils of old, But an interest in birthdays that the years have not dispelled.

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