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Merrill Moore, like William Carlos Williams, is a doctor who also professes poetry. A rich, restless Boston psychiatrist who likes long-distance swimming and long-distance sonnet-writing, Merrill Moore has written so many sonnets (50,000) that he habitually thinks in blocks of 14 lines. Since his 18th year he has written an average of five sonnets a day, and as many as 100 in four hours. This month he published a few of them: M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets (Harcourt, Brace, $5).
His book is less a collection of poems than a clinical exhibition. Its stated purpose is to make not words, but Merrill Moore, make sense. Accordingly, though the book occasionally and happily deviates from its stated purpose, most readers will count Merrill Moore neither poet, poetaster nor poeticule, but a scientist drunk with words.
Genevieve Taggard, teacher (at Sarah Lawrence College), biographer (of Emily Dickinson), editor (of The Measure, a magazine of verse) last month published her Collected Poems (Harper, $2.50). With her rich literary background and varied social experience, she writes as one who feels that she is expected to say something rich and varied. Her poems are stopgaps for silence—what their author apparently feels would be an embarrassing silence. But since silence speaks louder than stopgaps, her poems give a net impression of saying nothing. Her lyrics, whether addressed to Nature or to Man, all share the same insufficiency. All are the work of a worried, earnest, poetical nondescript.
Donald Davidson, 45, is a Tennessean, professor of English at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University, a leading member of the Southern agrarians (Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, et al.). Like the rest of those resolute, nostalgic patriots, he believes that the thread of U. S. destiny was lost somewhere in the tangle of the Civil War. As citizens the agrarians think they can tie that thread into modern life, as poets they feel that the thread has gone for good. In Lee in the Mountains (Houghton Mifflin, $2), a book of short narrative poems, Davidson's heroes are dead men, whose heroism he tries to embalm in lifelike verses. Sample (on Andrew Jackson's statue in Nashville):
In bronze he rides, saluting James K. Polk,
His horse's rump turned to us in the smoke.
Despite Donald Davidson's sincerity and competence, his attempts to revive a live present by hypodermic injections of a dead past are poeticulous.
There is nothing of the dead past about Kenneth Fearing. This month he published his third book of poems, Dead Reckoning (Random House, $1.25). Kenneth Fearing, in his 29 free-verse lyrics, writes about now and his anger is now:
Not the saga of your soul at grips with fate, bleedingheart, for we have troubles of our own . . .
not all the answers, oracle, to politics and life and love, you have them but your book is out of date no,
nor why you are not a heel, smooth baby, for that is a lie, nor why you had to become one, for that is much too true . . .
nor how cynical you are, rumpot, and why you became so Give us instead, if you must, something that we can use, like a telephone number. . . .
Because practically the only energy in his words comes from anger, Kenneth Fearing is a poeticule—a poet, because his words are so brimful of anger they leave no room for hate.