User:Iadmc/To add to W. R. Moses

Critics on Five Young American Poets

Paraphrase what Robert Daniel in The Sewanee Review says: ...nosing for mere biography can turn up little beyond Moses' fondness for hunting and his mild disturbance at the successes of the Nazis". "...little striving to concentrate by means of metaphor, to underscore by a change of cadence,or to thrust home by climax."
 * "According to his note, most free verse is to him 'very uninteresting'; he is preoccupied with poetry in its formal aspects."
 * "Some of the titles... promise a generous helping of the intellect in the poems; but most of them hold only splashes of sunlit scenery..."
 * "It is impossible to feel there is an individual projected into this style."
 * "To turn from ["...death and mortal strife" (from the poem "Nothing")] to the "limpid greenish lake" is to court... that all pervasive mildness that creeps at the reader from these verses.
 * "...limp regularity of the lines reflects the lack of "mortal strife" in the writer's sensibility.
 * "But you must let the undulations of it lap you for forty pages, to be completely soothed."

Also, paraphrase J.C.R in The Kenyon review: Compared unfavorably to Browning and Wordsworth.
 * "The poems of Moses are most peculiar and the hardest to consent to."
 * "There almost never was such unrelieved particularity in verse, and its most baffling."
 * "He does not generalize, or generalizes barely, or generalizes badly."
 * "But since most young poets generalize too easily... his bias is exceptional and something should come of it."