Poets on Poetry

46 From VJi Ifred's published letters we had already observed his extreme closeness to his mother. We had sensed, too, mainly from negative information, a certain antagonism between Wilfred and his father. Harold Owen's book helps to put these two relationships in their right perspective, for Mrs. Owen's devotion to, and reliance upon, her oldest son appear to have estranged him to some extent from his brothers and sister, giving him a responsibility and maturity above his years, denying him "if not his boyhood, at least his boyishness" (p. 23). It was chiefly Wilfred's lack of interest in boyish pursuits that led to the misunderstanding between him and his father who had looked to his firstborn to be a substitute in his own unfulfilled ambitions. Harold, who more nearly approached Mr. Owen senior's conception of what a boy should be, draws a retrospective portrait of his father as an attractive, hard-working, intelligent but disillusioned and frustrated man. Of VJi Ifred, what stands out with astonishing clarity is the absolute unswerving selfishness of his determination to acquire knowledge. In a family of straitened means he accepted, apparently as a right, an education that must have put a financial strain upon his parents. He saw Harold, who had been sent from one miserable board school to the next, developing an artistic gift, yet he allowed decisions to be made which would further his own education even if Harold were condemned to be "an errand boy" (p. 264). Though Mr. Owen from the position of maturity is able to look back and excuse Wilfred for being "utterly unaware of any unfairness" (p. 28), driven as he was by a dormant creative urge, nevertheless the antagonism of the two boys breaks through from time to time. This book, the first of three volumes, takes the story of Wilfred Owen and his family to 1911. I await the succeeding volumes with impatience. Leicester, England Hilda D. Spear 4. Poets on Poetry Karl Shapiro (ed). PROSE KEYS TO MOOERN POETRY. Evanston, 111: Row, Peterson and Co., 1962. Paper. $2.25. The list of anthologies of novelists' comments on the novel now includes something to suit almost anyone's taste. Now we have Karl Shapiro's collection of poets' comments on poetry and it seems likely that other volumes of this kind will follow. Every teacher will no doubt miss one or another essay he would rather have seen included, but on the whole Mr. Shapiro has gathered a varied and interesting collection. The essays are organized under two major headings, which direct the reader's attention to the dominant aesthetic debate in all periods of literature, that between the Classicist and the Romanticist. This at first seems like an oversimplification of the complex tendencies in poetry; in fact, Mr. Shapiro's thin little headnotes before each selection support this suspicion of oversimplification ; and Shapiro's rather fuzzy little foreword also is not really very promising. The essays themselves, however, come to their own defense. Part I: Keys to Modern Classicism includes well known pieces by Poe, Pater, VJilde, Eliot, Frazer, and others, but it also has interesting selections by Baudelaire, Huysmans, Arthur Symons, Jessie L. Weston, Hulme, Pound, Confucious, Yeats, Fenelosa and Wallace Stevens, many of which are not often reprinted. Part II: Keys to Modern Romanciticism includes selections from Whitman and from James E. Miller, Jr. 47 (his critic), from Rimbaud, Hopkins, Wildred Owen, Auden, W. C. Williams, Jeffers, Tate on Hart Crane and from Crane's work, and from Lawrence on Poe and on Whitman. I sus pect one can make a great deal more of this collection than Mr. Shapiro seems to have in mind. The Chronological Guide to Modern Poetry gives a skimpy and really quite meaningless selection of titles (criticism, prose, poetry) and something Shapiro calls events. One may wonder what Shapiro has in mind when he lists the Surrealist Manifesto, Poe translated by Baudelaire, Dadaism, First CANTO published in POETRY, UDY CHATTERLEY arrested, Pound released, IADY CHATTERLEY released, and Death of Tennyson all as events and gives no category designation for "Decadents" (why the quotation marks?), Death of Wagner, Symbolist Manifesto, etc. He records...