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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, January 18, 1942.  5
The New Books of Poetry
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Katherine Garrison Chapin.

PLAIN-CHANT FOR AMERICAN SONGS AND BALLADS. By Katherine Garrison Chapin. 141 pp. New York: Harper & Brothers. $2.

BOY AT DUSK and Other Poems. By Ralph Friedrich. 60 pp. New York: The Fine Editions Press. $2.

AND IF I CRY RELEASE. By Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger. 59 pp. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc. $1.50.

WIND THE CLOCK By Winsfield Townley Scott. 79 pp. Prairie City Ill.: The Press of James A. Decker. $2.

TIME AND LOVE. By Dorothy Dow. 107 pp. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. $2.

By MAURICE SWAN

The third volume of Katherine Garrison Chapin's poetry reveals an extensive range in theme and technique which the two earlier works had only indicated. The poems are identified with our national traits in history, epochal incidents in our national life, colorful depiction of landscapes here and abroad, and personal sentiments. Each individual poem is closeted within a central theme, a record of an experience sculptured with infinite skill for stark objectivity and form.  There isn't one poem in this collection of ballads, lyrics, sonnets, and a ballad play which contains parts that struggle to come together as they do in E. E. Cummings and the surrealists, nor is there ever an illogical separation between the frames of the poetry and its subject-matter, as exists in a major part of the poems collected in "Five Young American Poets." As in the case of John Peale Bishop, her poetry will augment the sphere of your sentiments without modifying your sensibility. It is for this reason that she expresses in her credo that a poet communicates but himself whenever attempting to project any facet in phenomena, and that though he be a writer of many brief lyrics the poet is busy all his life writing this one poem.
Katherine Chapin has an ideology (which is the structure of poetry, the prose content) but lacks a sufficient volume of texture in her technique to give her work the dualism of images and logical substance which makes for major poetry. The images are the disparate voices that break through the structure of a poem, singing a fugue from a single theme. Music moved out of a single plane into variations when the Gregorian Chants were overtaken by the new methods of Palestrina, who splintered a choral into four voices, and in the same way English poetry gained dialectics in the seventeenth century.  Whenever an age has to fall back upon its sensibility for the lack of a universal belief the artists resort to this technique. Ralph Friedrich has only sensibility without tradition or credo to direct and canalize his feeling and Katherine Chapin has in the main an ideology without a private sensibility to give her scope varied dimensions. Unfortunately, the crisis in modern poetry today is quickened by these two extremes, and unless our poets will blend them, we will either shift into a puritanical phase or a distorted abstractional one. Katherine Chapin compensates with a wealth of varied external techniques for what she lacks in internal planes that are inherent in a private sensibility.  Her words are linear in the act of continuing scenes; close to the classic equivalent. Her best things are the ballad poems sung by choruses, which is a new direction of her talents.
Ralph Friedrich even lacks the technique of free association which the moderns use to compensate for the lack of belief while search for a subject:
So, sourceless even, light endures an age,
Perhaps forever, publishing in space
A dead star's wonder, bright upon the page
Of midnight.
The language cannot cope with the development of the sensibility, and this is why the vision is beyond the mechanism of word patterns. Sometimes the poet does catch a glimpse of the ties between seeming irreconcilabilities in nature, but he is much too lethargic to capture them in a felicitous phrase.  The concept never equals the sense of things.  When he catches up with this feeling in a rare successful line we have a positive indication that he has a talent which will grow on the nourishment of the great poets and by diligent work, until a phrase reflects the myriad angles of his profound sense of things. But it will have to be stretched on the skeleton of a belief if it is to gain significance.  "I Give You" is a memorable poem, excelling in exquisite music and pictorial images.
Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger escapes the pain that man is heir to by sublimating it into a symbol that answers the defeat of flesh and dream with the steadfastness of the seasons which always bring back Spring.  She begs that she never see the light beyond the hill and never know how wild the mind that follows the flame; "in this familiar air I have one lamp, and lest my sorrow might seem dim, let me not know a lovelier light." Her verse stays close to tradition and she has a facile manner with her lines to lasso the image in the mind and the stress in his heart.  Unfortunately, she is never able to transform the fine sensibility she has for things to the widest scope possible. This poet can only measure the world with things her sensibilities shape upon her heart:
Let Aprils follow other Aprils
neither too early nor too late- 

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Ralph Friedrich.

But lest some vagary remind me-
Oh, let them never deviate.

Winfield Townley Scott is a striking poet working with an original key which was provided him by the techniques of our modern school, but one who exists in an isolated sphere in the same way that Chirico does in contrast to other surrealist painters.  Scott's stark contrast to the surrealist poets like Parker Tyler, Weldon Kees, etc., is that he never builds beyond a single phenomenon, whereas they struggle to find a magnet for a series of phenomena.  He is, in fact, more an impressionist than a surrealist. It is for this reason that Mr. Scott does so well in his vitriolic critiques against society.  As in impressionism in painting, the poet working in this sphere stays out of the mysterious region of the imagination.
The poems are mainly a sparkle of impressions:
So what if I tell you you are all mad,
And I have in my head sane, circling fish
That weave the colors of stars burning
Under the waters of my cranium world,
A luminous aquarium of turning scales
That all your zeppelins shall not devour.

The strange portions of his work, in concept, I feel, have been affected through John Wheelwright's influence and the subtle shifting of musical phrases by simulating the poetry of Dylan Thomas.  Like Wheelwright's, it is a felt poetry as well as thought, uneven and inclusive and highly original.  I expect that he will grow in stature.
Dorothy Dow is an accomplished mimic of the talents of our best poets, but what she accomplishes is only the stratagem. A close perusal of her work will reveal in residue only the artifice which she could scrape from the surface of their art. But she is so cleverly adept that some of her poems come off strikingly. She has her value as a parodist of the multiple technique of our moderns, especially in her humorous poems, which take on deeper implications through the artifice of dialectics. I wish she would exercise her talents in this phase mainly.  The following lines are from "Compendium":
She has the megrims sometimes and is docile:
A cosmic urge reanimates her and cures her.
And when she yawns that life is growing duller
Her thyroid's deviation reassures her.

The Lodestone
Someday, perhaps, weary of being cynical, 
We may refire the cold ore.  Shall we so,
And tongued with iron again grandiloquently
Sing yes, in place of the forever no?
A little then though dreaming we might see
What has been seen, the far-set pinnacle
Drawing around itself the atom-flow
Of men and many stars, and words to be.
Out of the waster yet sweeps a little gold,
Peel the thin sunlight from a Winter tree:
Late in the night what sailor still is bold
To break out a top-gallant, set his binnacle
Upright, the needle for the pole-star, north,
Steer for the shining icebergs, and sail forth?
CEDRIC WHITMAN.
From "Orpheus and the Moon Craters and Other Poems." (The Bread Loaf Printers, Middlebury College Press.)
(To be reviewed).

As Napoleon Revealed Himself in His Letters
NAPOLEON SPEAKS. By Albert Carr. 392 pp. New York: The Viking Press. $3.
By EDGAR PACKARD DEAN
One hundred and forty years ago another Great Man was on the march. He, too, occupied most of the capitals of Europe, sent kings into exile and traditional boundaries into oblivion. He likewise gave Europe a new order. He, too, came not as a conqueror but as a liberator, to free peoples from their shackles - shackles imposed not by "Jewish plutocracy" but by a feudal aristocracy.
The obvious parallels between our day and age and the Napoleonic period have influenced Mr. Carr. But not enough. And the differences have escaped him entirely. "Napoleon Speaks" deferentially tips its hat to the present and then proceeds to describe the Great Man as countless other books have done.
The method of description is not quite so conventional. In so far as possible the narrative is developed by long quotations from Napoleon's letters.
The early chapters are the most successful. As a cadet at the Royal Military Academy of Brienne the young Napoleon was a scholastic success but a social failure. The egoism, bitterness and frustration of the gentleman cadet are clear in his letters to this mother.
The advent of the Revolution found him at first indifferent and then moderately sympathetic.  Like many others, he also had his brief against the old aristocracy. Friendship with Augustin Robespierre - the brother of the terrible Maximilien - led to promotion in the army and a pragmatic if not ardent espousal of the Republic. But between Napoleon and many phases of the Revolution there could be little in common. If he was a frustrated aristocrat he was nevertheless an aristocrat.  He intensely and sincerely believed that an aristocracy was necessary to the greatness of France; and later, when he had established himself in power, he created a new nobility. Above all, he never trusted the populace.  To him the populace was always a mob - disorderly, treacherous, uncontrollable.  Yet in later years he assiduously cultivated the favor of the lower classes.  Whatever the motive - it was a combination of both fear and political astuteness - the policy returned handsome dividends. But at the crisis of his career he refused to collect on these dividends.  In 1815, after his defeat at Waterloo, the ruling classes had deserted him, but the workers in the Faubourg St. Denis vociferously came to his support.  They cried for rifles to defend him. But he refused to arm them - the one class that would still fight and make sacrifices - because congenitally he distrusted them.
Like many biographers of Napoleon, Mr. Carr falls into the obvious traps. Three illustrations will suffice.  On the morrow of the coup d'état of 1799, Napoleon was far from all-powerful.  The old Jacobins who had weathered the Terror and Directory were as a group, stronger than he, and Napoleon took many into the new government. Later he could treat them as he pleased, but in 1800 his pleasure was, perforce, to please them. Mr. Carr also overemphasizes the projected invasion of England in 1805.  True, Napoleon considered such a campaign and made preparations for it. But he was never single-minded about it and all the while quietly made plans for war with Austria. The last illustration concerns his fall from power in 1814. Mr. Carr ascribes a good share of it to treachery within France.  But apathy is a much better words. The nation was weary of war.
One can regret that Mr. Carr hasn't benefited by the history of our own times. For the first time in a century we are in a position to have a balanced appraisal of a very great, a very able, but a very ruthless man.