UNDERCLIFF. Poems 1946-1953.
By Richard Eberhart '26. New York: Oxford UniversityPress. 1953. 127 pp. $4.00.
As has been the case with a number of American poets, Richard Eberhart's talent was widely recognized in England before it received much notice here. The reason may be revealed in one of the poems in his new book: "Phoenixes Again." It is concerned with
"the veiled seeming Of this subtle mystery,"
with the question whether poetry
"Should be ultimately fruitful, Understandable by the mind."
Written at what the poet calls "this mid-time, while strong in blood," it describes the urgency with which the "celebrant" must practice his vigorous art at the maturity of his powers, but foresees an ultimate task, at least as important:
"And I would with my praise Subdue the mind to flesh's parity And as that goes, conclame Order, calm, and luxury."
The key to an earlier recognition in England is, I believe, the English willingness to accept content as of primary importance in American writing, and to regard laxity or turbulence of form as an American inevitability.
Conversely, many American critics, when Eberhart's work first appeared, were still regarding recognizable formal achievement of a high order as at least indispensable, if not primary, in the recognition of poetry as distinct from other kinds of statement. Thus the English were quicker to note that Eberhart almost always concerns himself with concentrated substances of poetic experience. Now there has been a reaction on this side, perhaps sycophantic, as evidenced in the uncritically exclamatory praises of this new book - typically in a New York Times review by Selden Rodman.
If I read "Phoenixes Again" with a correct interpretation of the poet's own program, we need not greatly fear that he will be relaxed by tardy acts of critical overcompensation, or by what appears to be a formative Eberhart cult. His poetry, while growing in compassion, and tempering in vigor, seems to me still to have an ultimate station to strive for. It has still to conclame "Order, calm, and luxury," and he has told us that he is aware of this.
Eberhart's impulse to recognize the stuff of poetry, unconstrained by any conventional notions, may be seen in this volume in such poems as "The Cancer Cells" (beauty within a clinical horror), "On Shooting Particles Beyond the World" (space fiction or fact, seriously considered, and already well known by inclusion in Williams' Little Treasury) or "Fragment of New York, 1929." The last of these may be the poet's best performance so far: eight pages of close, heart-wringing contemplation of the business of mechanized death, amid the brutes who deal it and who suffer it, in a slaughter house.
One of my own favorites, in this volume, is "Seals, Terns, Time" where the poet again exercises his deft impulse to particularize a tremendous subject in tangible symbols. The seal's eyes are man's eyes, looking out of the ancient sea. The terns are, I suppose, man's aspiration. Man, at rest upon the oars, hovers in his little boat between them, on the surface of a timely, timeless sea. It may be that I like it so well because it moves farther than most of the poems in this volume toward the goal of order, calm, and luxury, conclamed.
What I miss most, still, in these poems written in his forties, is an assurance of the poet's own values as a craftsman. I have no trouble whatever with Eberhart's concepts. To compare them with those of two other poets who were well received first in England, I think the concepts in this volume alone have a wider range than, and an equal importance with, those of either Frost or Eliot. But the inevitability of structure and of symbol, which seems to follow in each of their successful poems, appears in very few of Eberhart's. Most of these poems seem to be rough drafts of fascinating works still to be completed marvelous lines intermingled with puzzlingly awkward ones, vivid phrases set off by cliches.
Not to say this is to deny the validity of the poet's own objective, of an order, calm, and luxury to come.
