Volume 6, Number 6 · April 14, 1966
The Long Poem
By Denis Donoghue
Wildtrack
by John Wain
Viking, 50 pp., $3.50
Rivers and Mountains
by John Ashbery
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 63 pp., $3.50
The War of the Secret Agents, and Other Poems
by Henri Coulette
Scribners, 111 pp., $3.95
Nights and Days
by James Merrill
Atheneum, 56 pp., $1.95 (paper)
The critical argument against the long poem is easily given. The thing is a freak of nature, a contradiction in terms, a monster of disproportion, like the nurse's breast in Brobdingnag. In the nature of things, it cannot be poetry much of the time: When it is not, it is absurd, pretentious, provincial. The argument has often been mounted with considerable force, but readers are never convinced. If the language of poetry is as resourceful as poets say, it should be possible to make a long poem as 'well written' as a good novel and gain some further advantage from the fact that the language is poetic. It should be possible. And it has been possible on classic occasions from Homer to Milton. But the modern poet is not so fortunate, we say, listing his misfortunes.
Review, 2147 words
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