Selected Poems of Walt Whitman. Edited by Stephen Spender: (Grey
Walls Press. 3s. 6d.) " GEMS from Leaves of Grass"—Whitman himself always regarded
any such proposals with understandable distaste. But it is a plain fact that some parts of it are better than others ; or, to be more enthusiastic, in certain poems and passages Whitman easily touched and sustained a level of greatness. And a concentrated fifty-page selection drawn from these, done with good judgement (as it certainly
is here), is useful to.have. It reminds us, if we should be likely to forget, that he is among the best of poets ; and it should encourage
those who tend to be repelled by the idea of the " good grey poet " to explore for themselves the complete Leaves of Grass, and so get the full flavour of what Mr. Spender rightly calls " one of the greatest and most powerful poetic sensibilities of the modern age." Mr. Spender's introduction is not quite up to the standard of his excellent selection. He extols Whitman's achievement with admirable warmth, but there is a certain fogginess about his critical account of it. He suggests, with Lawrence, that Whitman is " supremely the poet of death." Whitman's praise of death is consistent with his complete acceptance of humanity and nature, but that doesn't mean that he exalts it above life. Mr. Spender draws timely attention to the formal qualities of the verse ; he might have developed this further, and shown how the formal control is most malted, significantly, in Whitman's greatest poetry, so that " free verse " becomes an inadequate label for the art of such a superb poem as " The Dalliance of the Eagles."
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