SELECTED POEMS

by Richard Eberhart,'26. Oxford University Press: New York,1951, 86 pp., $2.50.

It is a comment on our civilization, rather than on Dartmouth College in particular, that among all those living who hold its A. B. degree, the man who has attained recognition not only in this country but in England among lovers of literature, and whose work shows most signs of durability, should be known to comparatively few of the faculty, few of the alumni, and almost none of the undergraduates. I refer, of course, to the poet Richard Eberhart. It is the perspicacity of the Press of the University of Oxford which has sponsored Eberhart for many years.

To all whose affection for Dartmouth comprises a pleasure in the arts professed there, the present Selected Poems is an admirable introduction to Eberhart. Here, in lines always vigorous (and if occasionally rough, of an intended and carefully disposed roughness), is the record of the struggle of a human mind and sensibility with an ambiguous antagonist, like him whom Jacob encountered at the ford. The unknown wrestler may be angelic; he is assuredly mysterious and mighty. Is his name Death? Sometimes, as in "The Groundhog," Eberhart's most widely anthologized poem. Is his name audible only in some dimension beyond death, beyond space, beyond time? A syllable of the Possible Absolute? This poetry is evidently metaphysically strenuous.

One trophy Eberhart has won—and won as a poet in these poems, wherever and however else he may have done so: the conviction that "action must be learned from the love of man." An especially vivid and moving celebration of this creed is the closing poem in alliterative verse, "Brotherhood of Man," recording the victory of human nature amid the horrors undergone by the American soldiers who became prisoners of the Japanese on Bataan.