Younger Poets: The Lyric Difficulty

A Case of Samples by Kingsley Amis. Harcourt. $3.50.
Letter from a Distant Land by Philip Booth. Viking. $3.00.
Adam’s Footprint by Vassar Miller. New Orleans Poetry Journal. $2.00 (soft-bound copy, $1.00).
Poems by Marcia Nardi. Alan Swallow, Denver. $2.00.
Uncertainties and Other Poems by John Press. Oxford University Press, London. 10/6.
Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana; Poems by Eli Siegel. Definition Press. $I.65.
The Green Wall by James Wright. Vol. 53 of the Yale Younger Poets Series. $2.50.

This piece was to have been something more ambitious than a review, was to have offered some general survey of new poets and an opinion, from their practice and what was revealed of their intentions, as to “where we are now.” This project proved too ambitious, and had to be given over. First, the mere quantity was too great: from more than twenty books I have made a rather drastic selection which nevertheless may be thought arbitrary. Second, great as the quantity is, it is not enough; almost every book gives notice of others which might have an equal claim to consideration at this time, and I cannot be at all confident that what I have before me is honestly representative of any tendency or movement. I can see, on the other hand, that in or around or behind many of these books something about tendency and movement seeks expression. The lyric difficulty—the difficulty of continuing to see lyric poetry as an art by itself, the preference or compulsion to see it as the expression of strong emotions or fashionable opinions, the insistence on communicating as opposed to making—this difficulty seems to affect very severely a number of the poets whose work I discuss in the first part of what follows, as well as a larger number whose work I have omitted from consideration. So if this essay is, after all, a review, one of those omnibus reviews in which no one is done either justice or even the proper injustice (for which there isn’t room), I have nonetheless put down some general reflections on the theme, usually (I hope) in connection with the examples which provoked them. As I am dealing mostly with the work of young poets, I will take from one of them the motto which seems appropriate; Mr. Philip Booth, prosing along to Thoreau in a homey New England way, says it: “I still defend the new growth with an axe.”