Here is another reviewer who tells us what is the stuff of poetry. It was tried before, I think, by Bruin of Colchester and, somewhat later, by Mgr. Polidore Flaquet.

Now it is time to question this kind of talk by Mr. Graham. It is time to challenge what Mr. Stephen Spender, a better-tempered Englishman who is also living at present in our monstrous country, recently deplored as “the denigration of American poetry as external by English writers.”

For the subjects of poetry cannot be limited. The lesson taught to us by Mr. Ezra Pound, Dr. William Carlos Williams, and Mr. T. S. Eliot cannot be soon forgotten. Poetry will be what it must be, and it is not the critic's job to administer it or patronize it, but rather to investigate its methods and explore its meanings.

It is apparent from Mr. Graham's review of Losses that poetry is, in his opinion, only that thing which puffs itself up, like a certain tropical fish, whenever you touch it. It must be a living thing, swimming back and forth between the lines of print, ready to explode in your face at the slightest anxiety. It is not the words, it is not what they say; it is a small organism which slips skittishly among the periods and commas, eyeing the barnacle-enrusted words with dark distrust. What a pity Mr. Graham has never caught one of these creatures to show to the rest of us!

The fact of the matter is that what Mr. Graham calls “incidental values” can be turned into very good poetry indeed. Furthermore, whether we would or no, these values are hardly incidental. The world is full of motor cars, of machine guns, of money. These things have a considerable influence, sometimes good and sometimes bad, on our modern life. They can be treated as instruments by all of us, as statistics by sociologists, as subjects by artists. Many poets use them as symbols; many more (and I believe Mr. Randall Jarrell is, on the whole, one of these) choose to employ them in their own right as things to be noticed and questioned. They cannot be eliminated from poetry, nor can they be made incidental to it.

Two capacities are required for the composition of poetry: a talent for writing in our English language, and a sure intelligence. If any person possesses these qualities to a sufficient degree, he can create poetry. I would be the last to deny that learning, sensitivity, good taste, and understanding of the tradition may assist poetic endeavor, but these attainments, however they may lend assistance, are surely not the first qualities that a poet must possess. Emotional sensitivity, above the rest, is the quality most overrated since the time of the Romantics in England. Poetry results, not from the conjuncture of an object and a sensitive perception (which children enjoy to a greater degree than adults), but from the observation of an event, “internal” or “external,” by a penetrating intelligence. And if that event involves the operation of objective phenomena, as it very often must, then those objective phenomena will assume central value for the observing intelligence.

I suspect that Mr. Graham will set this down as another argument for “realism,” which is the malapropism he has so blindly pinned to Mr. Jarrell's poetry. Of course, realism in its broadest meaning must be adjunctive to all art: art depends on life. But realism as a literary dogma has long since been cast aside by serious artists. Mr. Jarrell, to select only one example, has hardly been concerned with the presentation of an accurate report of the war. The world of war which he has created in his poetry is one of which, I dare say, he, as a participating soldier, was unaware. But working as a poet, he has constructed a world, and it is a true one because it is a logical metaphor spanning the desert of imagination between reality and ideality.

Mr. Graham pays considerable attention in his review to the notes which Mr. Jarrell appended to the poems in Losses, and he seems to deprecate author's notes generally. Yet I think he would not disagree with the modern editors of the Divine Comedy who feel obliged to include in their notes explanations of the medieval concept of celestial and infernal geography. Such information is helpful and often entirely necessary for the understanding of poetry written about things of which readers may be more or less ignorant. Mr. Graham seems to say that it is improper for poets to write on subjects which readers do not know. But many people enjoy reading the Divine Comedy and the topical satires of Pope, Chaucer, or even Juvenal, about which they know next to nothing from personal experience. In our departmentalized world, where the experiences of life have become less and less common to society, objective understanding necessarily precedes imaginative understanding. How can a poet today write of war for a civilian audience unless he is willing to describe the apparatus of warfare? Is a poet to be denied the expression of a genuine experience merely because it occurs when he is seated before the view plate of a radar set?

It would appear, then, that at least one of the criteria adopted by Mr. Graham is bound to invalidate his criticism, and certainly this is so in his review of Losses. The book contains war poems quite as good as any written in this century. “A Camp in the Prussian Forest,” “Eighth Air Force,” “Burning the Letters”—these and others are without question successful poems. Yet all of them deal with the “incidental values” dispraised by Mr. Graham. Part of their power accrues, in fact, from their immanent recognition of the dehumanization of conflict and of the giant metal wills which crash together in our robot warfare. However much ultimate motives derive from men, it is the fictions and objects, not the human beings, which get out of hand and cause the immediate, disastrous damage; and since these forces lumber through society with elephantine strength and come together here and there in tropical bursts of tumult, they can be treated validly by Mr. Jarrell as real mythic movements against which our smaller events may be cast. These same external forces act behind the poems which are not about war: “Loss,” “Lady Bates,” “A Country Life.”

I come around again to my starting point: the subjects of poetry cannot be limited. Poetry is good or bad in its methods, not in its materials. The poetry written within the milieu recommended by Mr. Graham is often exciting, and it is unseemly of him to denounce other media with partisan animosity. It seems to me that the varieties of poetry in western literature which can be read with plenary enjoyment by contemporary readers ought to convince Mr. Graham that he is puffing quite preposterously on a dead cigar. It is time for him and his dogmatic, parochial colleagues to give over their idle wrath and ask themselves why a poem is worth reading, instead of why the poet sees different things than they want him to see.