During the last three months, to the almost complete indifference of 130 million Americans, some 25 books of poems have been published in the U. S.
TIME takes these books seriously. As TIME sees it, poets acknowledge a responsibility which sooner or later every human being must acknowledge. That responsibility, stated in its humblest form, is to make words make sense: stated in its most ambitious form, it is to make words make complete sense. Twentieth-Century poets have had a hard time trying to make their 20th-century words make sense, but that was their responsibility. Either they could live up to it, and be poets; or pretend to live up to it, and be poetasters; or ignore it, and be poeticules.
TIME, recognizing this perennial responsibility of poets, recognizes also its own journalistic responsibility to name poets poets, poetasters poetasters, and poeticules poeticules. For the poets' effort to make words make sense is an effort to make the thing on which all human communication—letter-writing, conversation, journalism, literature—ultimately depends. To the extent that poets fulfill their poet-hood they are making human communication more possible. To the extent that poets lapse into poetastiness or poeticulosity they are perverting or muddling human communication.
TIME, in reporting on contemporary poetry, aims to publish, as impartially as it can, this constant news: that poets have a responsibility of major importance to everybody, which individual poets are fulfilling, evading or ignoring in varying degrees.
Probably the most difficult and at the same time the most lucid of present-day poets is Laura Riding. Manhattan-born, Laura Riding at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was settled in Mallorca, where, with Robert Graves, she published books of the Seizin Press. Forced to leave the island at a few hours' notice, she is now living in Brittany until Mallorca returns to its normal ways. An indefatigable worker, she has written nine books of poetry, six of criticism, a novel. This month her Collected Poems (Random House, $4) was published in the U. S.
As a poet committed to the task of making words make sense, Laura Riding prefaces her poems with one of the most straightforward yet complete declarations of a poet's purpose yet published. "A poem is an uncovering of truth of so fundamental and general a kind that no other name besides poetry is adequate except truth. . . . Truth is the result when reality as a whole is uncovered by those faculties which apprehend in terms of entirety, rather than in terms merely of parts. The person who writes a poem for the right reasons has felt the need of exercising such faculties, has such faculties. The person who reads a poem for the right reasons is asking the poet to help him to accentuate these faculties, and to provide him with an occasion for exercising them." In spite of this illuminating introduction, readers will still find her poems difficult. The main difficulty for U. S. readers will probably be that she writes in a language in which every word carries its fullest literate meaning. For this reason, language that would seem clear in Shakespeare or Mother Goose may seem obscure in Laura Riding:
. . . the public pomp and private woes
Of social nature, crossed estate
Where reason's loud with nonsense