Poetry

In the year of victory and threatening peace, the poets were not up to much. The biggest news was made by two soldier-poets, Frenchman Louis Aragon, and Ser geant Karl Shapiro.

Aragon: Poet of the French Resistance (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, $2), edited by Hannah Josephson and Malcolm Cowley, offered a translated selection from among four of the six volumes of verse which this facile versifier wrote in France during and after the German occupation. Aragon was celebrated in this volume as the laureate of the Maquis. In English these poems, intensely patriotic, often loose and ballad-like, richly embellished with surrealist imagery, are eloquent, interesting, but difficult to assess as poetry. The detached reader is likely to wonder whether Aragon is being canonized with too little regard for Jean Cocteau's cynical observation: "In French poetry there is only one rhyme: La France, la Resistance."

Karl Shapiro's 2,072-line Essay on Rime was written in the Pacific, without access to books. Modest in tone but ambitious in purpose, it is the effort of a talented poet to keep writing in the midst of a war. But it is a disturbing indication of what poetry (and its readers) have come to, that the publication of this work was widely regarded as an important event. The poem contains many unexceptionable and not too generally recognized ideas and statements ("dialectic is the foe of poetry"). But it contains little that is not self-evident to readers who know that poetry belongs more properly to the heart and ear than to the head and eye. Moreover, Shapiro chose to write his essay in a singularly lame conversational style which would have made dullish reading as prose and, as verse, very seldom practices what it preaches.

Other poetry of 1945: Randall Jarrell's Little Friend, Little Friend; William Carlos Williams' The Wedge; C. Day Lewis' Short Is the Time; Louis MacNeice's Springboard (some of the most resonant and masculine of contemporary poetry); Walter de la Mare's The Burning-Glass.

Among poetry anthologies were: War Poets (edited by Oscar Williams); War and the Poet, a far more comprehensive anthology edited by Richard Eberhart and Selden Rodman. It included war poetry from all over the world and from 1800 B.C. to the present.

There were also some noteworthy poet ry roundups: John Crowe Ransom's Selected Poems; W. H. Auden's Collected Poems; David Morton's Poems 1920-1945. Bolts of Melody, though it came pretty much from the bottom of Emily Dickinson's bureau drawer, was indispensable to those interested in one of the rarest and most mysterious of the 19th Century talents.

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