THIRTY-TWO DARTMOUTH POEMS. Ed.

by Prof. Richard Eberhart '26 (English). Hanover, N. H.: Dartmouth Publications, 1965. 38 pp. $2.00.

This volume, the sixth in a series which merits continued support, is surely interesting enough to deserve to be taken seriously. One should resist the temptation to dismiss it with a patronizing mutter of "undergraduate verse" or with the stock recollection that even Keats produced little of value before his 21st birthday.

That said, space remains for a few general observations. Most of the poems in this volume struck me as strangely silent, strangely subdued; I suppose I had expected more rebellion, passion, or cynicism, and not quite so much meditation. Further, while I was reading these poems, there came to mind three lines by Yeats. "A line," he wrote,

will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Active minds are at work in these poems, trying hard - perhaps too hard - to transform thought into poetry, into appropriate rhythms and images; but often, when the transformations are imperfect, the thoughts obtrude and the poems fail to convince, either dramatically or lyrically. They do not, that is, seem "a moment's thought," inevitable and spontaneous, but a contrivance. Well, poetry is a contrivance; but the art, as always, is to conceal the art — and that, it seems to me, is the major unsolved problem in this worthwhile volume.

Department of EnglishUniversity of Massachusetts