Poetry's 40th

U.S. poetry was fizzing when Harriet Monroe of Chicago started Poetry magazine in 1912. By opening her pages to some of the best young fizzers, she got some "firsts" to be proud of: T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, Carl Sandburg's Chicago, early verse by Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The magazine became a haven for published and unpublished poets, regardless of poetic school. They could always pick up encouragement and, if necessary, a meal. And for 24 years, like an encouraging schoolteacher, Editor Monroe sat waiting for fresh geniuses to blow in. Her office was rarely dull; nobody was much surprised when Vachel Lindsay appeared one day with a poem about King Solomon's 400 wives, and led Editor Monroe through an improvised dance while he chanted it.

Poetry's circulation has never risen much over 4,000, and the magazine has never paid its own way. The editors have been able to solve this problem by buttonholing well-to-do well-wishers. Nowadays the head of the fund-raising committee is Mrs. Ellen Stevenson, ex-wife of Adlai Stevenson, herself an occasional contributor to Poetry. But over the years, editors have been confronted with another problem even graver: somewhere along the line, U.S. poetry ceased to fizz.

This week Poetry celebrates its 40th anniversary with an oversize, 95-page issue. Editor-Poet Karl Shapiro wrote his best contributors, asking for gems. Though the issue shines with famous names in contemporary poetry--W. H. Auden, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams--most of the gems are made of paste.

Auden's poem is probably the best of the lot: a description of "a plain without a feature," where masses of men march to the command of a dictator and nobody knows "Of any world where promises were kept/Or one could weep because another wept." But even this poem is all too predictable to anyone familiar with Auden's work. Still more predictable are Marianne Moore spinning fine verbal webs, Wallace Stevens in a suavely elegiac mood, E. E. Cummings broken out in lyrical wonder. As for the younger poets, most are earnestly prosy, weary beyond their years, and cautiously derivative.

Critics discussing the plight of poetry in the U.S. are prone to speak of the impatience of readers jaded by too much news and too much entertainment, of the callous indifference of editors, and of the fact that a lot of people who jump on modern poetry as obscure would also have trouble with Milton. Perhaps so. But a hard look at Poetry suggests that it is not only the philistinism of the public that is to blame. Poets can get away with many things, but not with dullness.

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