PARTISAN REVIEW
execution; and the influence of poets like Graves, Muir, MacNeice,
and Empson, appears not to have been strong.
I have spoken
of
the transatlantic lag. Empson is the outstanding
English victim of it, or we are its victims: his poems, rumored often
enough, have still not appeared. Even so, his spry, compact, and brainy
verse has had some effect (Howard Nemerov's "Two Sides ... Medi–
tation from Empson" achieves his tone only in three lines, the 14th,
17th, 23rd; but another poem, "To the Memory of John Wheelwright,"
is more successful with it; and see William Jay Smith's "Villanelle")
and would have effects better still if it were collected here. We are
more willing perhaps than the British to trouble to secure non-domestic
books, but it is not enough. Englishmen are published here occasionally.
There have been Treece and Manifold and Keyes and others, while
for some reason there have not been Roy Fuller or Vernon Watkins.
One of the latest is Laurie Lee, who will represent the situation well
enough. His stylistic affiliation is announced in his second line with
"morning slender sun" echoing Spender's "morning simple light," and
the poems are very "lyrical." Generally in unrhymed stanzas, and he
takes it easy metrically, obeying his impulses: in short, he has only
diction and images as tools, and what he can learn or impart is rather
limited. Stanzas, I am bound to report, could be shifted from poem
to poem without notice or disturbance if one did it cunningly. His
mind is lazy or medieval: "the iron sleep our senses wear." But his
feeling for nature is real and might make a very interesting hole if it
were not digging with its fingers. He is best in a simple piece like
"Landscape" where his love-and-nature identifications are not sweating
for Lorca's passion but gently reminiscing. This theme is genuine: "I
hear the forest open her dress," "as the hills draw up their knees,"
"0 the wild trees of home/with their sounding dresses," "the bank of your
breasts / with their hill-cold springs," "a womb of leaves,"-small and
not indispensable, but genuine. And now Henry Reed has been pub–
lished here. But I must say more of the situation into which he has
been published.
II
One has the impression here and there reading through John
Ciardi's book
Other Skies,
his second, that the Auden climate has now
made it possible for a hat-rack to write a perfectly presentable poem
on any standard subject (beaches, teaching, flying, birthdays, oiling a
machine gun, death, Saipan, pin-ups, drugstores, hospitals, photographs)'·
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