Poetry -- It's a Bargain

The New Criterion never disappoints. Consistently, it publishes the best arts writing of any periodical in the United States, and the special poetry section in the April issue confirms my otherwise dubious resort to hyperbole.

William Logan, whose The Undiscovered Country recently received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, files a partial minority report with “Elizabeth Bishop Unfinished.” Typical sample: “Her early poems, stuffed with allegories and fables, betray too close a reading of George Herbert – sometimes she seems a Metaphysical, Third Class. (Her juvenilia here shows she hadn’t yet learned to trust or instincts – worse, she didn’t know she had instincts.)”

Up next is, for me, the centerpiece: the delightful Eric Ormsby’s “An Austere Opulence,” devoted to his attendance at a poetry reading given in February, at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, England, by Geoffrey Hill, surely the greatest living poet in the language. How I wish I had been there. Hill is 73 years old and in the last decade has published seven books of poetry and a collection of essays. I am not a believer, but I laud Ormsby for having the courage to state the obvious:

“Although the dogma of diversity piously excludes `Englishness’ as a recognized category, it is, I think, Hill’s strenuous Christianity that forms the major obstacle to acceptance. His work not only is steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but take it very seriously; his poetry can neither be confronted nor understood apart from it.”

Next comes “Defeating the Poem” by Denis Donoghue, a critic and professor of literature at New York University: “In class, many students are ready to talk. But they want to talk either about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading. They are happy to denounce imperialism an colonialism rather than read `Heart of Darkness,’ Kim, and A Passage to India in which imperialism and colonialism are held up to complex judgment.”

Then, we have “Johnson’s Divided Mind,” by poet-critic Adam Kirsch, author of The Thousand Wells. Kirsch’s piece starts as a review of the new edition of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, which the reviewer describes as majestic: “This balancing of clauses, with its symmetry and solidity, embodies its own reproach to the eccentricities of Cowley and Cleveland. Over the hundreds of pages of the Lives, such balance becomes more than a syntactical principle: it shows the deep constitution of Johnson’s mind, and helps to explain the high value he places on balance, moral and aesthetic, in the poems he discusses.”

Finally, David Yezzi, poet and executive editor of The New Criterion, gives us “The Unrealists’ Return,” a rare defense of reason and intelligence in poetry in the 21st century: “The abandonment of logic and reason in poetry, like the abandonment of traditional meter, is nothing new,” he writes, and proceeds to prove his case.

Also in the April issue is a poem, “A Science Fiction Writer of the Fifties,” by Brad Leithauser. On the newsstand, The New Criterion costs $7.75 – less than most movie tickets and far more entertaining, challenging and enduring.