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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Poetic Attitudes

Poetic Attitudes

Mr Crichton Smith shares something with the American poet Richard Eberhardt – his poems are products of the intellect and will, with rarely that cooperation of nature or the subconscious mind which gives blood and ballast to a man’s writing –

Rum in the high air: the Indies breaking on the hinged horizon. All the huge conceit of water winking towards decks. That real arrogance when nothing’s vague but brims for his own sake.

And sailors, salted to the carved hair, cut tunics from the sky . . .

I quote from ‘Sea-Song’, one of his best poems. Everything is present in the poem except the sense of a world outside the poet. He writes on Hebridean villages, girls, John Knox, a dead sheep, a sick gull, Kierkegaard, Culloden and his mother: and what one gets is an attitude, never more than a trace of the substantial creation he is writing about; though the images are bright as paint and sharp enough to cut your hand.

After Ten Burnt Offerings and Autumn Sequel and Visitations it was permissible enough to conclude that Louis MacNeice had lost the powers that made him the liveliest, wittiest, warmest poet of the Thirties. A few vague Buddhist or Taoist stirrings under a cold husk of reminiscence were no comprehension for the loss of a very good companion. People change;page 478 poets are people – one cannot complain. MacNeice, like ourselves, halfway through life woke to find himself locked in a hall of mirrors (his poems record the situation, or the worst evade it) without the key he had always thought he had – luck, gaiety, love, an unknown God. These new poems evade nothing – they are cut out of iron and lead and tin; and occasionally some metal more like uranium –

Lavender green for youth, lavender blue for love –
Never is time to retire.
I have had both and unstinted and now, whatever
Doubts may arise from below or terror brood from above,
I will stand as if under fire
With a sweet-smelling bunch in
My hand, face to face with Never

I find them intensely moving.

1961 (258)