Elizabeth--yes, one wouldn't want to be too harsh on poets'
self-indulgences...though I might be a little less forgiving on editors who
rather than simply leave it alone actually go out of their way to
embarrassedly defend such a poem, as if their hero couldn't possibly have
written something so bad. Hm, I'm not sure "Beautiful Lofty
Things"--admittedly, a pretty self-indulgent trip through his toybox, the
grammar dropped in the manner of Herbert's "Prayer" (or some of Geoffrey
Hill's poems)--is quite as awful as the poem that follows it, "A Crazed
Girl" (which contains the phrase "beautiful lofty things" in it,
actually). -- I never managed to catch the Yeats bug when young so I've had
to, so to speak, grow _in_ to the poems rather than _out_ of them. --
Anyway, it's often easy enough to pick out the bad bits in authors, though
still a necessary exercise, if only as a sign that the reader is _paying
attention_.
Chris: There's a recent review in the LRB by Ian Hamilton of an edition of
Randall Jarrell's criticism where he quotes Jarrell on that Spender line--to
the effect that it made him ashamed of the human race. Hamilton suggests
that Jarrell's reviews contained a lot of posturing, which I'd probably
agree with. It is a memorably fatuous line nonetheless.
Incidentally, talking about bad poems by famous poets, JH Prynne's worst
poem is buried in the pages of _The English Intelligencer_--if I remember
rightly the title was "Time to Go". It's the only poem of his from that
period that's not in the _Poems_, & I can see why. Though I seem to recall
running across one admirer of it. -- On the other hand I wish he'd permit a
reprint of some of the pre-1965 poems in _Force of Circumstance_ &
elsewhere: some are quite good.
all best --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
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