Poetry

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29798, 14 April 1962, Page 3

Poetry

(Reviewed by R.G.F.I Hedley Lucas. Later Poems 1954-1960. London (Independent Press), 196 L 287 pp. There is no law which forbids a man, or even a poet, to record his reflections on this or that event or issue or problem, especially if he enjoys it. Composition is a great pastime. On the other hand there is no law (as Hedley Lucas, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, can perhaps verify) which requires the reader to share these reflections with persistent satisfaction. Some people, we must assume, will embrace this collection (over four hundred poems) with a grateful and resounding sigh: they probably spend the rest of their literary time making rude noises about so-called modern poetry, about the “verbal contortion and mental confusion” with which this, “the work of a genuine poet" which “will appeal to lovers of Verse that is reflective and distinctive.” is ostensibly to be contrasted. Typical titles are “A business man,” “Evening of life,” “Across a Bank counter,” “Man’s unity,” “Down but not out,” “Hungary. 1956,” "Youth’s revolt,” “The human spirit,” “Within a Summer bower,” “Revivalist,” “Sad child,” “Reality.” "Railwaymen," “I’ll match thee, death,” “Plankton-on-Sea. ’ ’

We should respect such sighs. The survivors of this century may perhaps dismiss many of the literary favourites of the last two generations as so many melancholic pedants and shrieking illiterates. We perhaps do wrong to consider as incredibly sixth-formish, verses such as these which happen not to betray a neurotic preoccupation with the fashionable hysterias of our time; we perhaps do wrong to consider as abysmally proper, sentiments which happen not to be those of the fashionable jeans-and-sweater school; we perhaps do wrong to consider as measurelessly shallow, notions which happen not to reflect the fashionable guides to modern thought. But we may be wrong as critics, since as critics we are partisan, while being less than wrong as readers, as mere consumers. Patience can sometimes be a better rule than Taste: there is, if no law, at least a wellfounded tradition according to which a writer is advised to make his material interesting. by making it clever or polished or consoling or shocking or beautiful, or various or funny, or something. If. as here, we find instead a few gems of spontaneity and insight outnumbered by the elegantly novel, and these together outnumbered by the comfortably impressionistic and the safely honest, we have ultimately to say only that people who like this sort of thing will like this sort of thing, and leave it at that.

Mario Praz’s classic of modern literary criticism “The Romantic Agony,” is one of the latest volumes to appear in Collins’s Fontana Library. To reprint a work of some 500 pages in such an inexpensive edition is indeed an achievement: and this paperback should be popular with students of nineteenth century literature, who up till now, have generally consulted on library shelves.