Selected poems

Review by Booklist Review

Of the first four newly assembled collections in the American Poets Project, the most exceptional is Harvey Shapiro's selection of poems on World War II, the lion's share of them by poets who were soldiers. As Shapiro points out, whereas several World War I poems were well known to those who served in World War II, the only well-known poem of the second war is Randall Jarrell's tiny chiller "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Perhaps that is because, Shapiro observes, the poems he presents are sharply different from the most famous World War I poems. The latter are by upper-class Englishmen who served as officers, and whose class solidarity shows in sweet patriotism and sweeter camaraderie, which endured after patriotism was soured by disillusionment. Shapiro's selections are by Americans who served as enlistees, older civilians jaundiced by the first war, and conscientious objectors. There is virtually no patriotism in them, and certainly no class feeling. They are the work of individuals wrenched out of normality and compelled to depend for their lives on others who in turn depend on them for theirs, but who don't feel compelled to like one another or to sacrifice themselves for their fellows. This state of consciousness is nowhere more forcefully expressed than in the harrowing long poem "World War II," about the crash of the bomber that Edward Field navigated into the North Sea. Many other fine poems come out of the war in the air, including Shapiro's own, though some of the sharpest, especially Louis Simpson's alarming rhymed quatrains and the excerpt from Peter Bowman's verse novel, Beach Red (1945), are infantrymen's work. The other three books are fresh examples of a familiar phenomenon, the representative selection of a major poet's work. McClatchy's Millay and Updike's Karl Shapiro--no relation to Harvey, and an even better known World War II poet--would be fresh for no other reason than that, arriving in this series, they seem to make major-status claims for their poets. But each does more. McClatchy's is the largest Millay selection ever, drawn from all her verse books to display her career-long adroitness in her favorite form, the sonnet, and her variety by including even excerpts from an opera libretto and the one-act antiwar play Aria da Capo. Immensely popular in her lifetime (she was the first poet to broadcast regularly), Millay (1892^-1950) won fame as a teenager with her al fresco and imaginatively post obitum effusion on love and death, "Renascence," and as her preoccupation with the sonnet suggests, she stuck with those themes and the related one of time. That implies a certain one-chord quality about her, and indeed, the sonnets rather blur together. Read occasionally and mixed with her saucy lyrics about erotic love, they reveal their strengths--not of imagery, but of surprising attitudes expressed within strictly observed poetic conventions. Her work is very much new (modern) wine in old (classical) bottles. Karl Shapiro (1913^-2000) is much easier to sell than Millay. Even more technically adroit, Shapiro worked in--he did not experiment with--virtually every verse form, and he wrote engrossing and amusing prose poems. Updike likes Shapiro's concreteness, his concern with and for society, and his accessibility. For those qualities, Shapiro's mentor was William Carlos Williams; stylistically, as Updike says, "Auden gave him his voice." Commenting on observable facts in poems such as "Auto Wreck," "The Fly," and "Troop Train"; on other poets and poetry in Essay on Rime; and on his own life, especially his Jewishness (he was resolutely secular), Shapiro was contrary, opinionated, and very funny, shrewd, intelligent, and democratic. Updike's selection is, fortunately, quite different from Stanley Kunitz and David Ignatow's Shapiro culling in The Wild Card (1998), and most who read one will want to read the other, and then probably seek out Shapiro's original collections and his essays, memoirs, and novel. As for Whitman--collected andselected so often--what, or who, could possibly make another selection seem fresh? Who is definitely Harold Bloom, dean of American literary critics, who considers Whitman "the principal writer that America--North, Central, or South--has brought to us." Bloom's best single descriptive of Whitman is "immediate," to which any reader of "Song of Myself" will assent: Whitman is with his readers ("If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles" ). Bloom is concerned with Whitman's construction of his all-encompassing persona, and he selects with that in mind: first, some fragments of what became "Song of Myself"; then the "Song" itself in its final form; then four great poems of, Bloom argues, persona-shaping crisis, as well as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; and three sections of other, successively later poems. Bloom connects Whitman's project to the thesis of his The American Religion (1992) that the tendency of religion in America is to replace God with man, and with the fragments, Bloom presents explicit evidence of the attempt. --Ray Olson

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

These inaugural volumes in "The American Poets Project" series form a useful introduction to the evolution of modern American poetry in loose historical progression. The volume on Whitman, father of modern American poetry, restores the voice of a poet who initiated free verse to speak of a growing America and thus takes us into the 20th century and beyond. Fortunately, editor Bloom ignores all of the psycho-social-sexual labels doled out to Whitman and lauds him simply as "the principal writer that America...has brought to us." Selections include some of Whitman's best, e.g., "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and the spiritual bridge between Whitman and his future readers, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Millay, one of America's strongest female poets, is similar in her metrics to 19th-century poets, but her flamelike intensity is pure 20th century. When she died in 1950, her poetry almost died with her; not until after the women's rights movements did her once acclaimed verse resurface. Editor McClatchy provides a generous sample of her poetry, highlighting her early years ("Renascence," "A Few Figs from Thistles"), the lesser-known poems never before published, and the posthumously published "Mine the Harvest." World War II sliced the 20th century in half and forever changed the American way of life as idealism and self-reliance ceded to franchising and instant gratification. The poets appearing in the World War II anthology-compiled by Harvey Shapiro, himself a poet of the war-portend this major mind shift by their tone, which questions rather than sanctions patriotism, valor, and the values of the 1940s. Arranged by the poets' birth dates, the poems include Robinson Jeffers's cynical nod to violence as a natural cause of earth events; Randall Jarrell's graphic depictions of airborne death; and John Ciardi's whimsical renditions of horror. Lastly, Karl Shapiro, one of the more influential voices of the late 20th century, displayed complex and contrary tendencies in both his life and his poetry. Editor Updike notes that Shapiro's experimentation with voices and forms alienated those who admired the metrical dexterity of his early poems. This commanding new series, which the Library of America will expand each spring and fall season by adding two or three titles, is a worthy addition to all libraries.-Nedra Crowe Evers, Sacramento P.L., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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