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CLOSE UP
exactly, but it is a necessary preliminary to criticism (even if usually the
rough-working is kept back) because it is on the results of such analysis —
why he wrote this, or how he came to write this, or who went first, or what
will happen afterwards — that judgment can be based, if judgment becomes
very important after understanding, which in itself is an act of criticism.
We know the film Blakeston by this time, or we don't quite know.
Even O.B. fans have had, from time to time, to change their direction.
Because it was obvious he was up to something, and just what he is up to
naturally an artist doesn't bother to say when he can point to this and that
and say : " Why, of course, this and that."
Each morning I walk in the valley of that country Finding the night still under low leaves I would spend my days fashioning hinges for new feeling Replacing rusty latches for old expression
That is what we find out from his poems that he is up to. He says it clearly enough now, and all else that has gone before (Close Up, stuff, Few are Chosen, etc.) shift a little into a more direct focus.
Artists aren't always, of course, doing what they say they are doing, but there are here certainly new hinges which' only occasionally (rather too " patent ") break down. Or we haven't perhaps the knack of working them. There are levers I haven't been able to work — a poem beginning : —
Wax hands on slabs of glass Are Boredom's infinite )
but I have got the next poem to open successfully : —
Marked a red star on my calendar
which includes, if we are choosing, my " favourite lines " : —
Thus turning to star dial for red time Long vision with its multiples
and that is why I think this one is perhaps the most successful poem. Which
you may think a biased judgment, if a frank one, suspecting a reason. The
best, I should add, " of poems of that sort," for not all penetrate the " valley
of that country."
For there is here too another Blakeston, revealed sometimes in his stories, which, however, objectified, dramatised, could leave doubt. But in verse, with its person-revealing rhythm, intensity of emotion comes up. Which intensity is a dangerous thing in these days of sophistication, satirification and so on. But it is that which is here, making these poems more than the polite album pieces which so many clever people nowadays do quite well.
There is one beginning : — You say
Live on while I'm away
As if it were not death to be without you
which is quite simple and Shakespearian (W. " Sonnet " Shakespeare) and even runs to a regular iambic beat — a give-away hastily corrected elsewhere. A give-away in the sense that in these items which mostly come first in the