Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
Listen.”; a bird in flight; the “mOOn Over tOwns mOOn”; rain that can “move deeply,” with life and sex burgeoning in response; the bursting forth of a “white with madness wind” that tears “mountains from their sockets” and makes “writhing alive skies”; Poe’s version of the jangling and tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells, brought up to date; the spread of “twilight’s vastness”; and an elegiac piece, an account of the poet ascending a hill by the sea
at dusk
just when
the Light is filled with birds—
a poem so intense, and so well sustained, that we greatly resent the few spots where his mannerisms threaten to undo the mood.
We might say that Cummings’ biology is good, but his history is too bad. As historian, at the best he must niggle:
little
mr Big
notbusy
Busi
ness notman.
And at the worst, he must attack in the lump:
news alimony blackmail whathavewe
and propaganda
—an attitude too non-negotiable for a society to run a growing concern on.
Fearing’s clearly formed philosophy of history gives his work much better coordination and direction as satire. Cummings the antinomian symbolizes refusal as the little boy that won’t play. Fearing, the poet as politician, can offer a take-it-or-leave-it basis of collaboration, a platform, a communist set of values that makes for an unambiguous alignment of forces and a definite indication of purpose. He has a frame of reference by which to locate his satire. Whereas Cummings as satirist is driven by his historical amorphousness into personal moods as the last court of appeal, Fearing can attack with the big guns of a social framework. He can pronounce moral judgments; and remembering Juvenal or Swift we realize what an advantage this is, for any invective, implicit or explicit, is strongest when the inveigher is appealing to a rigorous code of likes and dislikes. Whereas both poets are alive to the discordant clutter about us, Cummings tends to be jumpy, shifty, look-for-me-here-and-you’ll-find-me-there. (After reading him for an hour or so, I show the tetanic symptoms of a cocaine addict.) Fearing is better able to take on something of the heavy oratorical swell, which he manages by an exceptional fusion of ecclesiastic intonations (the lamentation) and contemporary cant (slang, business English, the imagery of pulp fiction, syndicated editorials and advertising).
An inverted Whitman, Fearing scans the country with a statistical eye; but where Whitman sought to pile up a dithyrambic catalogue of glories, Fearing gives us a satirically seasoned catalogue of burdens. Whitman, the humanitarian, could look upon a national real-estate boom and see there a mystical reaching out of hands. Fearing conversely would remark upon the “profitable smile,” the “purpose that lay beneath the merchant’s warmth.” This method leads at times to the mechanical device of indictments held together by a slightly varied refrain, but for the most part the poet is as ingenious as he is sincere. I know of no better patent, for instance, than this way of saying (in “1933”) that the official pronouncements are crooked and that the organization to reinforce the crookedness is terrifyingly efficient:
You heard the gentleman, with automatic precision,
speak the truth.
Cheers. Triumph.
And then mechanically it followed the gentleman lied.
Deafening applause. Flashlights, cameras, microphones.
Floral tribute. Cheers.
His “Dirge” to the average man winds up superbly by the use of slang interjections:
And wow he died as wow he lived,
going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and
biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
zowie did he live and zowie did he die . . .
It is harder in limited space to illustrate Fearing than cummings, as Fearing does not get his effects so succinctly. But I might give one more instance of his skill. Readers will recall the often cited remark of Eliot’s wherein he characterizes his “general point of view” as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion.” One may greatly respect Eliot for his important attainments, and still enjoy the deftness of Fearing’s reference to
That genius, that litterateur, Theodore True,
St. Louis boy who made good as an Englishman in
theory, a deacon in vaudeville, a cipher in politics,
undesirable in large numbers in any community.
Through the volume, Fearing’s discerning hatred of all that the “fetishism of commodities” has done for us, as regards the somewhat prospering as well as the destitute, is brilliantly conveyed, along with a quality of reverie, of fears and yearnings that delve far deeper than the contemporary.
Recent Poetry
An Omnibus Review
Selected Poems by Marianne Moore (Introduction by T. S. Eliot). Macmillan
Six Sides to a Man by Merrill Moore, with an epilogue by Louis Untermeyer. Harcourt, Brace
Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow by Jesse Stuart. Dutton
Strange Holiness by Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Macmillan
Panic, A Play in Verse by Archibald MacLeish. Houghton Mifflin
Vienna and Poems by Stephen Spender. Random House
Collected Poems, 1929–1933, & A Hope for Poetry by C. Day Lewis. Random House
Dance of Fire by Lola Ridge. Smith and Haas
A Winter Diary and Other Poems by Mark Van Doren. Macmillan
Permit Me Voyage by James Agee with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish. Yale UP
Poems, et cetera by David Greenhood. Helen and Bruce Gentry
Chorus for Survival by Horace Gregory. Covici-Friede
No Thanks by e. e. cummings. Golden Eagle Press
Poems by Kenneth Fearing (Introduction by Edward Dahlberg). Dynamo
The Southern Review, July 1935, 164–177
A survey of recent poetry should begin with the Selected Poems of Marianne Moore, as Miss Moore would merit special honors by the members of her own Guild. It is customary to think of her as adept at expressing a tiny corner of experience—but inasmuch as this corner is close to the very core of poetry, a reader who is willing to meet her work halfway, bringing something in exchange for what he would take, may discover in her observations a quality or method that can be applied to many matters beyond her particular subjects. “These people liked small things,” she writes—and she is one of them—yet behind her miniatures there seem to lie larger equivalents, as a sprawling city is the equivalent of its neat contours on a map, or as one may learn something radical about the history of centuries by watching a few children at play in the backyard. She shows sympathy with little animals, not for their lowliness, but because of their exceptional precision, the “great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.” She describes vessels at sea that “progress white and rigid as if in a groove,” or the mountain goat, “its eye fixed on the waterfall which never seems to fall,” thereby exemplifying her kind of remoteness; and if she were discussing the newest model of an automobile, I think that she could somehow contrive to suggest an antiquarian’s interest. There is nothing more unlike her work than a steamroller, a difference which probably explains why she has included in her collection a withering attack upon one, beginning
The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack