POETRY CHRONICLE
London-and then the tiny
Twentieth Century Verse
devoted a few
pages to Stevens; whether his books have yet been published there I
don't know. Auden's blanket was spread earlier at home, and stifled
more, at the same time that it warmed more into issueless activity.
Dylan Thomas was closer and had an influence much greater than he
has ever had here-again there was a transatlantic lag in publication.
Then Auden was withdrawn. This is the first of three circumstances that
seem to me to account for what can only strike one as the general
unreality of the British impression of their poetic scene. Their pride in
Eliot imperfect, because he is by birth an American, they felt de–
nuded after Auden left; so that to clothe themselves they inflated almost
to absurdity the reputations available to them, Edith Sitwell's, Herbert
Read's, Spender's; and pr;used their young poets beyond recognition.
econd, all this was possible because along with a public interest in
poetry-much more intense and widespread than public interest in poetry
in America-goes inevitably a degree of gullibility; and it was possible,
third, because literary criticism was feeble. Thus,
The Ne:v English
Weekly
all during the War devoted far more space to reviews of verse
(and indeed to poems) than any comparable American magazine, but
the reviewing was for the most part extremely bad, having no responsible
contemporary criticism to rely on. The situation is extraordinary. Julian
Symons, in an article in
The Critic
last spring on "Some American
Critics," while recognizing the British weakness ("... if we are ever
lucky enough to get a general body of serious literary criticism") and
correctly isolating
Primitivism and Decadence
as "the most extreme
and in some ways the most valuable work of these writers," himself
showed how imperfect is the present British sense of these matters by
relying on the old Marxists-Formalists grouping in Kazin's
On Native
Grounds,
and by remarking, in a footnote to a paragraph that recom–
mends
The N ew Criticism
and
An Anatomy of Nonsense
as
if
he had
read them, that "Mr. Winters, certainly,
would
find many points of
difference between himself and Mr. John Crowe Ransom." The laxity
of criticism in England has had one very striking negative result, which
I must take up later. But it has helped the inflation of Miss Sitwell
(who is, no doubt, unduly neglected in this country) and of Spender,
giving recent British poetry a romantic cast and a fluid style or unstyle
uncommon here. Since what is eccentric is imitated from Thomas more
often than what is normal and profound, he has had a contributary
effect. Lacking a dominant tradition, the nee-romantics have split into
various groups, vying with each other not only in wretchedness of
257
