Verser's Playtime
The Screens, and other poems. By I. A. Richards. (Routledge, 18s.) BLISS is it in this dawn to be alive, the day- spring of linguistics. According to 1. A. Richards, what we have now is 'a spring dawn such as never broke, dazzling with promise and power never offered before.' In a lecture on 'The Future of Poetry,' printed with his second collection of poems, Richards asks why poetry appears less elated than he thinks she should, faced with this glorious prospect. It seems that this is mostly poetry's fault, or the fault of poets. On the other hand there is another culprit. Poetry feels unwell because no one attends to her. She has few readers, and those bad ones. And why is this? 'The root of this, I believe, is bad techniques in the teaching of Reading.' There you are! That's what is wrong with poetry, or with the world of poetry. The lascivious impertinence of our Sun- day press, what has that to do with poetry? The bottomless vulgarity that surrounds us, in shape and sound and image, what have these to do with poetry? Or how can any of this weigh in -the scales against 'astounding advances in linguistics in the last few decades'? Where on earth has Mr. Richards been living all these years? In some island of the academic blest? Nowhere on earth, at any rate; or not on the earth as I know it. And as for The Screens, chirpy eupeptic pipings and strenuous sessions of verbal horseplay, they belong in that same Never-Never Land. Good luck to them, and to their author. May he gam- bol, ever more high-spirited, in his dazzling dawn. Let him not be surprised, however, to attract few readers to this unearthly music.
Mr. Crichton Smith, however, inhabits the same earth with the rest of us. To be sure the poems themselves, and the flyleaf of his volume, insist that it's a very particular plot of that earth. But as Shelley remarked of Hell, Oban and Stornoway and the Isle of Lewis seem to make up, in Mr. Smith's account of them, a city much like London. There's John Knox of course, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the galleon in Tobermory Bay or thereabouts—but all so rich and mellow through a tasteful and up-to-the- minute patina of language that they live happily next door neighbours with Kierkegaard. Is this what Hugh MacDiarmid used to mean when he visualised a Scottish culture at once fiercely national and not in the least provincial? I think not. When this poet writes, I walked one day by the composed water and heard a secret whisper from a wave, the skill behind the epithet, the start of pleased surprise which we get from 'composed,' both metrically and in the sense—these are at once genuine and trivial. This is poetic accomplish- ment in the current manner—as we know it from Geoffrey Hill in Leeds, or from half a dozen Americans. All that's wrong with it is that it doesn't amount to anything, it isn't going any- where, there's no pressure behind it. And if this is what poetry is to Mr. Smith, nd wonder that his advice to 'A Young Highland Girl Studying Poetry' is that she shouldn't: Simple affection needs no complex solace
nor quieter, minds abstractions of the grave. What has come of his studies of Gaelic poetry, if they haven't suggested to him that poetry, besides being perhaps a complex solace and a refined pleasure which one may take or leave, is a human right of which no one should be de- frauded?
And what else has been wrong with Louis MacNeice, all along the line, if it isn't this same thing—that he doesn't believe in what he is doing? Here he is once again, with a tear and a smile, the Irish entertainer improvising along from one witticism or bright idea to the next. He has everything—inventiveness, grace, charm, wit, ideas, turns of phrase—except the one thing that makes sense of the rest; the concentration, the seriousness, that will stay with a poem to the end, through all the beguiling side-swipes, the amusing tangents, the graceful roundings-off, everything that tempts to 'let it go at that.' Mr. MacNeice will let it go.
Jack Clemo has little grace and no wit, no charm, only one idea, and an accomplishment which is extremely fitful and at best of a very cumbrous and old-fashioned sort. But he is serious—not about poetry as an end in itself (though that could be all right too), but about poetry as a vehicle for uttering as much sense as he can make of his life. His plot of earth is even more restricted than Crichton Smith's: not even Cornwall, but Cornwall of the china clay. But it is really his, really peculiar, carried before us with a clumsy authenticity, unique; and there- fore, by a familiar paradox, not at all con- stricted but a lucid and insistent symbol for de- vastated landscapes and devastated lives any- where in the world. The symbol gets its com- mentary of course; and the moral drawn is the same moral over and over, which is monotonous. But to compare Mr. Clemo's 'A Calvinist in Love' or, more remarkably (very remarkably indeed), his 'Prisoner of God,' with Crichton Smith's ambitious sequence, 'Love Songs of a Puritan' is to set naivete over against accomplish- ment, but also to set whole poems against a dazzle of incidental felicities. 'The Wintry Priesthood,' the second section of Mr. Clemo's book, is a mess; and he wears his Calvinism too consciously, with too much of an air. But he is one of the poets of England, and there are not so many of them that we can afford to remem- ber this one only as a curiosity. Do I need to say that the other three have all written acceptable poems? From Richards, 'Hope'; from Smith, 'For My Mother'; from MacNeice, 'The Truisms' and some others.
DONALD DAVID
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