Peeping Toms

POETS AT WORK (186 pp.)--Essays by W. H. Auden, Karl Shapiro, Rudolf Arnheim, Donald A. Stauffer; Introduction by Charles D. Abbot-- Harcourt, Brace ($2.75)

Poet Laureate Robert Bridges once fired a snooty spitball at all highbrows who peep into the boudoir of Art and try to "explain" her naked mysteries:

They must lack vision of Art (for elsewise they had been artists, not philosophers).

Bridges' warning is apparently no longer a deterrent to science's Peeping Toms. The 20th Century analyst, says Charles D. Abbott, is "passionately absorbed in the pursuit of hows and whys," and flatly refuses "to accept anything, even a work of art, without . . . trying to discover the laws that govern its making, the impulses that give it birth." So when Professor Abbott, a true son of his times, took over the Lockwood Memorial Library of the University of Buffalo, he struggled to find some up-to-date way of expressing his passionate interest in poetry.

He hit on the bright idea of asking poets to give him, gratis, early drafts of poems, work sheets, notebooks, etc. To the poets, these papers would be mere rejected lumber, but to analytical students they would give a priceless chance to delve into "the heart of the poem's mystery."

Lassoing Director. There were a few rebuffs: touchy Poet Ezra Pound blew his top; and the Widow Bridges remarked delicately that "she felt that there were statements in [her husband's] philosophy which implied a fundamental opposition to the theories behind our project." But undaunted Director Abbott galloped over England and the U.S., roping poets left and right--". . . lunch at Taplow with Walter de la Mare . . . the Isle of Wight with Alfred Noyes. . . . Witter Bynner adobe-housed at Santa Fe . . . Louis Untermeyer [cornered] in a cool fastness of the Adirondacks. . . ." Director Abbott sometimes corralled as many as five poets a day ("undeniably taxing"), and found his largest rewards in New York City, where, he says, poets range "in numbers almost beyond belief."

Already, his twelve-year influx comprises 3,000 work sheets--some by famed poets, some by small fry; some written methodically in notebooks, others jotted on old envelopes or on the backs of gas-and-electricity bills which do not always appear to have been paid.

The Bee on Beauty. No lover of MSS. is likely to dispute the fascination of the Lockwood Collection, or fail to thrill at seeing a poem's genesis in a forest of sharp erasures, half-illegible inserts, blots, missteps and idle doodles. But only five work sheets are reproduced in Poets at Work, and the comments in the four essays which make up this book do not suggest that the analysts are likely to get far in pinning down the poetic mystery.

Princeton Professor Donald A. Stauffer, after taking a deep dive, comes panting to the surface with a handful of old clamshells--e.g., "A work of art may have extremely small beginnings"; "the progress of an artist in creation is always toward . . . greater significance," etc. Poet Karl (An Essay on Rime) Shapiro finds that "tigers have a dual significance" for Stephen Spender, that "poetry is but one form of expression of mystic or demonic vision."

Silly Question. Best essay of the bunch is Poet Auden's--which is not an essay and not about the work sheets. Auden believes that though life and religion are serious matters, poetry is just a "game," whose charm lies in the fact that it can be played with skill and brilliance and without the horrors of the struggle-to-live. "The test of whether one should play it or not is simply whether one enjoys playing it or not, because the better one plays the more one enjoys it. . . . Ask a talented surgeon why he is a surgeon and, if he is an honest man, he will not say: 'Because I want to benefit suffering humanity'; he will say: 'What a silly question. Because I love operating, of course.' " Other Audenisms:

P: "All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state."

P: "A society which really was like a poem and embodied all the esthetic values of beauty, order, economy, subordination of detail to the whole effect, would be a nightmare of horror, based on selective breeding, extermination of the physically or mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars."

P: "There are events which arouse such simple and obvious emotions that an AP cable or a photograph in Life magazine are enough and poetic comment is impossible. If one reads through the mass of versified trash inspired, for instance, by the Lidice Massacre, one cannot avoid the conclusion that what was really bothering the versifiers was a feeling of guilt at not feeling horrorstruck enough. Could a good poem have been written on such a subject? Possibly. One that revealed this lack of feeling, that told how when he read the news, the poet, like you and I, dear reader, went on thinking about his fame or his lunch, and how glad he was that he was not one of the victims."

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