Not So Modern Poetry

MID-CENTURY AMERICAN POETS (300 pp )--Edited by John Ciardi--Tv/ayne ($4).

Anthologist Ciardi, a Harvard professor and minor poet, 33, asked 15 "younger poets" (several are in their 403) to contribute a batch of verse to this volume and to write introductory statements about their work. It seemed a good way to present a fairly representative cross section of the serious new U.S. verse of the past decade and also to let the poets speak up in their own behalf.

There is only one thing wrong with the result: most of the poems are pale, thin and derivative.

The Overshadow. In the '20s the avant-garde poets wanted to revolutionize the language and in the '30s to revolutionize the world. In the anxious and expensive '40s, they have largely felt obliged to try for tenure in the English departments of U.S. colleges. Of the 15 poets in this book, more than half are teachers or have recently been teaching--a fact their verse betrays with retributive accuracy. Most of their poems read like the result, not of getting involved willy-nilly in the life of man, but of a careful, cultivated and eminently correct genuflection before previous generations of poets or the present generation of crabbed critics. In most of. the poems, the influence of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden far overshadows the individuality of the individual poet.

Unlike such surehanded predecessors as Eliot and E. E. Cummings, who refused to make concessions to ready intelligibility, hese poets seem genuinely to want to be understood. One of them, Harvard Scholar-Poet Richard Wilbur, writes, "I am sure that in all poets there is a deep need to communicate." Wilbur places part of the blame for the neglect of poetry on 'the laziness and uneasy pride of a half-educated and excessively comfortable middle class, whose intelligences have so long been flattered by all our great entertainment media that they cannot associate pleasure with effort . . ." There is undoubtedly much truth in Wilbur's observation; it would be even more convincing if his own not-too-difficult poetry offered more honest pleasure.

The Old Themes. Two of the best in Editor Ciardi's collection are Robert Lowell 33 and Delmore Schwartz, 36. Lowell, an' old-family New Englander whose natural taste for rebellion led him to Roman Catholicism and then to pacifism and jail for evading the draft, writes richly rhetorical verses in which he is not afraid to work with the old human themes-death, war and ambition. Schwartz, a Brooklyn poet on whom the experience of Jewish immigrant life has left an indelible mark of irony, writes poems that are calculatedly flat, wry and witty.

Both have established the first prerequisite of the poet: an individual flavor.

Most of their contemporaries do little more than demonstrate again how little well-intentioned earnestness, friendly human decency and careful training have to do with writing poetry that crackles and burns.

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