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Such characteristically gay and hopeless verses are likely to make plain readers suspect that Williams has more up his sleeve than his poems express. Dr. Williams invites this suspicion by using a new-fangled code to express a primitive notion of beauty. For so doing, he ranks as predominantly a poetaster.
Simply give away your beauty
without talk and reckoning.
You are still. She says for you; I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
at last comes over everyone.
This literal translation from the late German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke gives a crude but not misleading idea of Rilke's utter reliance on beauty as a human achievement that needs no advertising. No greater justification for Rilke's reliance could be found than the spirit in which his translator, M. D. Herter Norton, has done Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Norton, $2.50). In Translator Norton's foreword, she explains with noteworthy clarity that although all of a poem is lost in translation, no real poem can ever really be lost. In translation or out, and despite the drift in some of his later poems toward mixing beauty and religiosity, Rilke is a real poet.
In contrast to Rilke, Frederic Prokosch relies on nothing but Prokosch. But on close examination, most readers will find Prokosch to be unreliable. An Austrian-American, instructor at Yale, Frederic Prokosch has written two novels (The Asiatics, The Seven Who Fled) which tickled occidental yogi-men. An able verbal fakir, Prokosch, by playing solemn tricks with the sounds of words, makes his poems bloom like a fakir's mango tree.
And through this foliage trickles the hinting smile
Of daybreak bringing delight to the opening eyelids
Of mortals: men the reflective, and also
The lynx, the condor, the smooth persimmon.*
The Carnival (Harper, $2), his second book of fluid, fashionable verses, marks him an already accomplished poetaster.
A more transparent poetaster is Joseph Auslander. His poetical surfaces hide nothing. His complete visibility has attracted popular attention, and has brought him official recognition, in the shape of an appointment as consultant in English poetry for The Library of Congress. His latest book of rousing, rhythmical lyrics, Riders at the Gate (Macmillan, $1.75), his eighth and his best, is a simon-pure example of poetical swaggering.
As much as a woman can, Kay Boyle swaggers too. St. Paul-born, expatriate since 1922, now settled in Megeve, France, Kay Boyle is one of the more uncomfortably brilliant short-story writers and novelists. In October she published her first book of poems, A Glad Day (New Directions, $2). Kay Boyle would have been considered a clever person in any age, except one in which cleverness outlived its welcome. Kay Boyle herself suspects as much:
This is the time of a dark winter in the heart
but in me are green traitors.
In spite of her cleverness, she never really owns her treachery; in consequence, her brilliance dissipates itself in smarting, useless pictures:
. . . Jesus like a butterfly
with his arms pinned open and his legs
braided up with pain.
Because such images are her best accomplishment, Kay Boyle takes rank as a vivid poetaster.