COLLECTED POEMS 1930-1960.

By Richard Eberhart '26. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1960. 228 pp. $6.00.

Two of Dick Eberhart's previous books are designated in their titles as "Selected" - which may explain the failure to use the same word again for this, a third and a larger selective gathering. Younger readers who are fascinated by his recent work should have a chance to acquaint themselves with the poet's substantial first book, A Bravery of Earth, here represented by only three pages of excerpts. A volume properly entitled "collected" should include it. And yet there is no eminent recent poet whose work in the long view stands more in need of selection. Dick has been ungovernably productive. Friends of his who share a strong hope of his ultimate endurance as a major figure in poetry share also a deep worry over the seeming failure of selfcriticism which permits him in the first place to put such terse, miraculous poems as "Rumination" and "'I Will Not Dare to Ask One Question'" in the same book with the prosy and lumbering "Of Truth." From the book in question, Burr Oaks, nine of the thirty poems have been omitted. It is comforting to be able to agree that all of these should have gone, and that "Of Truth" has not survived into the newest selection. But "The Ineffable" has, and it has always seemed to me to be just that, in both the primary and the variant senses: it deals with what is "incapable of being expressed in words" (I quote Webster) and demonstrates the proposition.

A sequential reading of this new selection does give encouraging evidence that a greater concentration upon the poet's durable virtues, is under way. It seems to me that Dick's chief talent is for a ruthless kind of metaphysics that uses concrete symbols: the lamb, the tree in the arm, the groundhog. His perilous flaw is pure abstraction. He loves, as a poet ought to do, all the great central words, but he tends in many poems to use them in a lax context, with the result that the meaning is hopelessly indefinite.

There could not be a better exercise in contrast of method and effectiveness than the two last poems in the volume which I have reread with care for the purpose of judging the principle of selection: BurrOaks. "At the End of the War" is, a long abstract exhortation which succeeds in saying only a fraction of what is conveyed in the much more restrictive scene of the following, somewhat shorter "A Ceremony by the Sea." Both survive among the present selections. Dick knew that the latter was the better, because he chose it to close the earlier volume. He does, not seem to realize how remarkably it is the better.

"The Moment of Vision," which after many readings seems still the most successful of Dick's forays toward the ineffable, may be his poetic credo, the justification for his evident trust of the inspirational moment, unexamined. It contains lines as different in quality as, In this pleasurable though unpredicable predicament and Went up through hitched forests to a gold plateau.

The fifty-one new poems reveal a continuation of the puzzling variation of quality. This time the last poem, "The Incomparable Light," presents the same dilemma of the ineffable; but another near the end, "Equivalence of Gnats and Mice," is - despite a small grammatical problem — on the level of Dick's beautiful, metaphysical best. That is to say, the level of the best poetry now being written by anyone.