Volume 46, Number 3 · February 18, 1999
Green and Secretive Islands
By John Bayley
The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative
by W.S. Merwin
Knopf, 331 pp., $25.00
The River Sound
by W.S. Merwin
Knopf, 133 pp., $23.00
For centuries now poetry and prose have been growing further and further apart. As prose has become dominant poetry has lost its old authority and freedom and become more sensitive and self-conscious, more provincial even. Like a minority language, it is spoken only among its own people, the poets who cherish it but also give it the air of a survival. Hard indeed for a poet today to ignore this tendency, let alone reverse it. Among long narrative poems the brilliant exceptions—Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, Macpherson's Ossian, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Longfellow's Hiawatha—succeed by emphasizing the role of poetry in competition with prose, rather than seeming to pay it no attention.
Review, 2863 words
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