Two Poems By ALLEN TATE Sonnet To a Portrait of Hart Crane. Unweathered stone beneath a rigid mane I have not grasped the living hand of you, Portent When you are dead and a frost of quiet laughter If you are dead when the wind cries again May I treasure this red girdle for sentiment? Your eyes blossom a gorgeous cluster that scatters No fruitage. I will caress one staggering moment After you are dead-and nothing matters. M Comment AXWELL BODENHEIM writes from New York: The Dial has awarded its annual prize to Mr. T. S. Eliot, and the result has already summoned, in The New York World, a parody on "Wasteland," the long poem responsible for this award. Mr. Lee Wilson Dodd, one of our contempororary geniuses, has paraded an uncouth dislikesomething for which parody seems especially adapted-ending with the significant cry: "O God! O Montreal!" Mr. Eliot would probably deny acquaintance with both of the afore-mentioned Deities. But, seriously speaking, the present abundance of parodies is a redundant invitation to boredom. The parody is merely an exaggerated sneer added to dislike, or an adulterated chuckle donated to admiration, and there are in America, at present, no Max Beerbohms to give it an agile extenuation. Certain critics claim that parody is a form of criticism, but criticism is an alertly serious adventure and uses humour only as an occasional escape from the over-authoritative gesture. Returning to The Dial's award, one must present an astonished respect to the phenomenon of an actually radical poet winning a prize of twothousand dollars, and yet, this award, like all others, is both pernicious and unfair. A money-award, from a magazine, group, or individual, is in reality never anything more than a personal loan or gift from certain people who desire to reveal a practical proof of their admiration for a particular creator. The so-called prize-contest involved is in almost all cases merely a farce and the choice of the winner is a prearranged one, being decided long before the actual formalities of the "contest" are announced. It is, of course, inevitable that judges, editors, and patrons of art cannot suddenly become open-minded and free from bias during the short period between the announcement and awarding of a prize, but this is not the point at issue. Instead of quietly sending their cheque to the creator whom they decide to aid, without indulging in advertisements or printed pedestals, these people desire to create the impression that he is indisputably superior to the creators in his medium, and of his time. This is pernicious because it is rarely ever true that any one creator holds a genius that completely or even partially over-shadows that of all his contemporary competitors. Yet, through the awarding of a prize, with its "bests" and eulogies, he is given this position of false dominance while other equally deserving men are placed in an unfair darkness. It would, for example, be far more important if all worthy poets were payed at a decent rate for their work, and the fact that at certain intervals some particular poet receives a halo and a cheque does not in any way advance the cause of poets as a whole. This cause will remain at a stand-still until we have men who are interested in securing for poets a fair rate of payment and fixed sources of publication, and not men who rise every year to award a problematical throne and a sum of money to their personal or impersonal favorites. The items of literary interest in New York just now are few. Professor John Erskine, of Columbia University, has just been elected President of The Poetry Society Of America. Being a member of this organization, I shall attend its monthly meeting tomorrow; listen to the usual reading of smoothly sentimental lyrics, invaded by an occasional religiously sombre note; arise to express my opinion of the afore-mentioned poems; engage in mock-argument with Clement Wood and Arthur Guiterman; and retire with the consolation of amusement well-earned. E Marginalia By JAMES B. CLUNY Metaphysical Interlude RASING my momentary identity, clear vision reveals a procession of metaphors. Time, the woof of this picture, itself grows ghostly. The generations flicker like spindles. Empires, busy as beavers, turn ideographs. And even you and I, Polycrates, sipping our coffee, discussing the art of poetry, also submerge in a strange repetition of symbols. Le Revenant An ambition in a top hat ambled solemnly back from the shuttling years. And he was distraught at his business-moon-ridden still, and somewhat ashamed of it, in the presence of that amiable gentleman. Ghost Noiseless as fishes swimming the seasons slip past him, snug in the warm bed. And a ghost moves in and out of his dream Vassal of beauty, seeking the pot of roses, lost in an alien and perilous city, skirting the alleys in wintry winds, sniffing the air for bread. For "poetry is a high calling," and it is of himself he is dreaming, snug in the warm bed. He is that phantom. TOWN TOPICS ON PARNASSUS Reviews A Critical Fable Delivered primarily in the hope of instilling instruction so airily that readers may see, in the persons on view, a peripatetic, poetic Who's Who. BY A POKER OF FUN, WITT D. O. S., A. 1. (Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1922) HERE is certain to be consternation TH upon the slopes of Parnassus if this book gains any wide currency-and it quite certainly will! For the author (or authors?) knows whereof he speaks and speaks with a devastating aptness of phrase. There are, to be sure, about twenty pages of preliminary which are, frankly, tedious after that, though some characterizations are too long drawn out, the pages possess a bustling and amusing effectiveness. Frost, Robinson, Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay, Lowell, H. D., Aiken, Fletcher, Teasdale and others, including the hapless Ezra Pound, appear-each chiefly characterized by his foibles rather than his sanities. The structure of the poem is simple: an elder of the generation of Longfellow meets and talks with a modern young man who irreverently presents his contemporaries. They appear in a delirious hailstorm of rhymes (the mixed metaphor follows naturally after the poem) where we find such horrors as "metaphors" rhyming with "get a force"; or "simious" hot pressed by "Linnaeus", "Zinnias," and "ignominious"-not to mention the breath taking series "quackery," "knick-knackery," and "back awry." Extracted, the rhymes are insufferable, but in the hudibrastic and hilarious original they deserve their place. Anonymity is justified only by good humor. The malicious wit who strikes in the dark is justifiably a pariah, but this book is not offensive. Too many suffer together for it to be personal and, although it is ruthlessly incisive, there is good humor behind the most of it. Aiken, to be sure, is badly treated (unfairly so I think) and Masters and Pound are severely handled, but in the main the book consists of good-humored exaggerations of evident foibles. We receive the truth so expressed as to be only half-true and doubly effective— which is a device proper to satire. Lindsay, for example, when he finds himself called: A mighty jazz dancer before the Lord must admit a fair hit well-turned, and so must the whimsical Kreymborg when he appears as the monkey of poetry who climbs on a stick. Amy Lowell also is irreverently handled, for, after some comment on her habit of preface writing, she is described as "Armed to the teeth like an old Samurai, Juggling with jewels like the ancient genii, Hung all over with mouse-traps of metres, and cages Of bright-plumage rhythms, with pages and pages Of colours slit up into streaming confetti |