Rhodes Scholer

BREAK THE HEART'S ANGER -- Paul Engle -- Doubleday, Doran ($2).

When Max Beerbohm wrote Zuleika Dobson, his farcical satire on Oxford (1911), he included in that gallery of light-hearted caricatures a character who still stands as the type -- at least to English eyes -- of the U. S. Rhodes Scholar. Abimelech V. Oover, like his brothers, was an admirable and good-hearted fellow, but there was something about him the English found oppressive. "Altogether, the American Rhodes Scholars, with their splendid gift of oratory, and their modest desire to please, and their not less evident feeling that they ought merely to edify . . . and their constant fear that they are being corrupted, are a noble, rather than a comfortable, element in the social life of the University." Rhodes Scholar Abimelech V. Oover has many points of difference with Rhodes Scholar Paul Engle, but readers who have met them both in print will see Max Beerbohm's point.

At 27 Paul Engle is still an undergraduate, but Break the Heart's Anger is his third book of poems. His second (American Song) last year provoked hyperbole from both directions. Some literary lobbyists thought they heard a great big new voice, thought they saw "somebody walking in America in proud shoes." Left-wing critics thought they spied a little black Fascist in his wordy woodpile. As if to confound their politics, in Break the Heart's Anger Poet Engle has taken care to announce his revolutionary sympathies. And from various European vantage-points (almost every poem has a different postmark) he hurls rude remarks toward his native land. He calls the Statue of Liberty "you skirt," Manhattan "you great water fowl.'' He has words of measured praise for Karl Marx, though he qualifies them somewhat by adding that Marx was "no economist, neither philosopher." The D.A.R. will not like his comparing Trotsky to Washington, urging "Let the earth give these men an equal praise."

Cover-to-cover readers grew a little tired of Poet Engle's almost invariable poem-scheme: a long rush of blank-verse rhetoric leading up to a short rush of lyrical finale. His gift of oratory sometimes led him on past the point of pleasure or even edification. By the end of his book. Poet Engle himself had grown a little tired:

Yet who am I

Alone man bitter' that his heart is tired, His heart's old anger broken by its grief . . .

Who am I to speak against the wind, Driving my lost words down it like wild ducks? '

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