… The booklet of this urban-sounding author [Corso] comes from Cambridge and has the title of The Vestal Lady on Brattle. All of the poems have the air of having been preceded immediately by the hipster vocative, “Man!” Their one-man-Calypso of jive goes “far out” to work that interjectional, parenthetical, real-crazy style associated with bop discourse. Bopster Corso simply digs one thing and another as he goes along, mostly himself, no time overtime on the craft. He fails a king-size assignment blowing a funeral “Saints” for Jazzman Bird Parker, but that's because the job is too big for his reed. His macaronic take-off on the innocent frontier of American whiskey-advertisements, in Central Casting Indian talk is a highly successful “scat” lyric entitled “King Crow”:

Old crow is King Crow
He know all there is to know
Like when corn is ripe or when comes time to snow.
Old crow he say: Skee-ack, like big
Thunder smack: and all crow
That is crow follow his long broken tail …

Catchy as it is, the jive-surrealist tone of voice raises questions. Is this poetry intended for settings analogous to those in which one hears jazz? Is there anything wrong with confusing the appeals of jazz music with that of poetry? Or trying to package products of one art (poetry) with atmospheric effects that might fetch glamor from the other (jazz)? Perhaps not. Perhaps he is only experimenting with the wider possibilities of a small-group jargon. But such fad-jargons of small groups are reassurances for insiders and rebuffs to outsiders, and if the newcomer takes them as meaning he is “in,” he is in; but if he takes them as meaning he is out, he is out. Would these poems sound interesting only if conveyed by a co-axial speaker into an audience already “far out” on jazz, done in the throw-away-the line style of Bebop styles of articulation?

As I've implied, criticism of poetry in the United States is still too studiously print-minded and exegesis-minded. A recent book on Poetry and the Age implicitly defines the poetic audience as being, insofar as possible, the extra-curricular analogue of a seminar. For example, Whitman is treated as if the problem were to distinguish him from what the copy-writers have stolen from him—to the neglect of the equally plain lesson that certain low-pressure documentary styles of radio and TV reporting have made some of Whitman's oratory and newspaper-print journalese more ridiculous than ever. What is often ignored in such approaches is the relation between what the poet can say, and how he defines whom it might get said to, and by what channel, and in what medium. Yet the way in which the poets of a cultural era “carve out” a relation, as Kenneth Burke might say, between the primary audience and the non-primary audience, can be crucial.

Under various impacts, the “primary” audience of the poet for the last one hundred and fifty years has been increasingly defined as a remote intimacy resembling the ear of God—perhaps the later poetry of Rilke is the next-to-rotten ripeness of this tendency. During the same period the “non-primary” audience of the poet—his “audience”—has been increasingly defined as a group of marginals to the core middle-class culture of industrialism. A tension about the way in which the “address” of the modern poem works out from the ideal primary listener to the coterie “audience” listener is one of the striking characteristics of contemporary poetry. Pound and Eliot were among the first English poets to make a sort of advantage out of the tensions of this process by self-consciously melodramatising them.

Now, the “ideal” primary audience is dying out with the decline of European hard idealism and American soft idealism. At the same time the coterie audience of marginals may be dying out, one major reason being, perhaps, that every year the core culture imitates them a little more and thus deprives them of their marginality. The mass media, whether used for “mass” programming or “quality segmental” programming, are hurrying the whole process by undercutting older, more naively “individualistic” notions of artistic production, and audience-impacts. The mass media have been indispensible, especially, in unsettling the cultural pieties by which older audiences expected to control and neutralize the art work by identifying it in this way or that before it had a chance to identify itself.

One result of our lag in catching up with these changes is a certain kind of poetic incongruence on the public air, especially the FM air. What could be more senseless in some ways than the Duino Elegies, for example, read over the radio? Good as they may be in print, or in the voice of a reader reading to a few, it may be generations before their manner will seem like anything less than arrogance over the air. The Four Quartets of Eliot run into some of the same problems in the transition from print-or-personal voice to audience-amplifying media. No matter how much quality is a major factor in reaching a wider audience, it is also true that quality rarely arises out of a mis-judgment of the possible audience. It does not seem that certain tones in the poetry of our contemporaries which are based on a hatred of the contemporary world, a distrust of sexuality, and a jealousy of competing media—tones that are found in Rilke and Eliot and in many of their followers in the U.S., are really rendered more acceptable by their gradual popularization through some mass media. It seems all the more important then, in approaching new poets, to conscientiously forget much of the newer criticism as being in contempt of audience, and the audience-concept.

Among these poets struggling for control over a tone-of-voice, we find one (it is a surprise that there are no more) whose Transition language is as universal as the style of The Reader's Digest or a Life caption, and his imaginary listener is someone in Paris in 1916. The French verse Ferlinghetti imitates has been as purposefully Veblenian and banal as a double egg-cup in recent years because the French poet is busy putting down his giant cultural past. It would be vanity on our part to think that because the architecture of French poetry needs a Le Corbusian answer to Versailles, American poetry needs a Dymaxion-House answer to Monticello! The audience of Ferlinghetti includes only those who want French poetry to influence American poetry in a way that most French poets would detest, and which most Americans have enough sense to see as irrelevant. Ferlinghetti is mis-using a real talent in order to write as if his problem, like Apollinaire's, was to achieve a workday vividness of language without the loss of the elegance of a language hand-polished by generations of French school-masters. This “problem” is now archaic, was always foreign to us. It simply distracts Ferlinghetti from carving out his own American audience in the 1950's.

There is one poet here, Ammons, whose imaginary audience, and whose tone-of-voice, remains elusive. If he is speaking to anyone, or anything, he seems, as I have suggested, to be holding converse with the language itself. The result is poetry that does not exactly seem to want to be listened to, not to say, “understood.” Yet, oddly enough, the rhythms of these poems seem more individualized than that of the poems by the other writers here—and at least one of his poems is compelling. In this experimental piece, he has taken the treacherous model of Whitman's style—building loosely declamatory additive sentence variations around a single visual symbol—and hammered out a potent poem. The general effect is like hearing a symphony orchestra in its shell, playing a resonant work from a great distance.

With ropes of hemp
I lashed my body to the great oak
saying odes for the fiber of the oakbark
and the oakwood saying supplications
to the root mesh. …

Quite in contrast with Ferlinghetti and Ammons is the poet who is the most impressive of them all. Layton, a Canadian, sounds as if he were speaking to an intelligent woman listener in the kitchen or in the car. Perhaps this is as much the result of his generally non-exotic themes as it is of his clipped use of language. In one of the best single poems in all these volumes, he adds a good exemplar to the increasing number of poems written in the 1940's and 1950's to children, including one's own offspring:

Mornings, I've seen his good looks
drop into the spider's mitre
pinned up between stem and stem …

In the succeeding twenty odd lines, he manages to dramatize the triangularity of family relations in an age in which children are culture heroes of a sort, and fathers are not. His connective-suppressing grammar, and his understatements, remind one occasionally of Auden's genius for copious demonstrations of reticence. It does not have the still-life atmosphere of most of Auden's poems involving social scenes, but it definitely does have the specifically British low-affect manner which has been driving American poetry to New Yorker verse distraction for some time now. This touch-me-not jargon is in part the language of the British upper classes, with all its deep meaning for British character development, and its irrelevance for ours. Let us admit that there are limitations on the degree to which a class speech pattern can undergo amplification. Yet Layton's work is superior to all except Cecil's in combining freshness and direction of language with an ability to convey to its wider audience the conviction that a real primary audience has been addressed, to say something that needed to be said. There are few groups of lines in all these books as good as the opening lines of Layton's First Snow: Lake Michigan:

No noise of rowlocks; no ecstasy of hands,
No sound of crickets in the inextricable air:
But a Roman silence for a lone drummer's call …

There are some signs here of a brewing disaffection against some currently baneful influences on American poetry: the new criticism, expedient religiosity, influences like Rilke, Eliot's veto on vulgarities, talk about small animals, the fauve Thomas, Francophilism, and anti-sexuality, to name a few. Yet the signs here are still enfeebled by the fashion of the day, and show how much leadership the young poet needs in order to break his chains.