Having Eaten

EDEN TREE--Witter Bynner--Knopf ($2.50). In the U.S. a poet's lot is not a happy one. Exception: Edgar Albert Guest, whom most of his fellow poets do not regard as a poet at all. Typical modern U.S. poetry does not sell for a good reason: misnamed "lyric," it is actually introspective, exhibitionist, an effort on the poet's part to escape from intellectual nightmare. Witter Bynner's poetic cosmos is top-heavy with intellect but more objective than most; he does not get hysterical about it. His poems are not great but they are masculine. At 34 he summed up, in The New World, what he thought about Life; at 50 he has written the sequel. Eden Tree.

"Celia," his early love, is dead; the Poet (he sometimes calls himself Adam) tries to keep faithful to her memory, but Lilith often makes him change his mind. He finds other distractions, too, "in the impersonal roundness of a bottle of whiskey orgin." Finally experience, wisdom, old age or lassitude rescues him from the bonds of the flesh: he is lonely but free. Cynical cinema-going readers may not be so sure.

Eden Tree is written in uneven rhymed lines that look jerky on the page but read easily. A parabolic narrative, its language stripped of ornament, it has few memorable lines (one of them: "There are always mornings and only some of them are good") but its cumulative effect is one of honesty, shrewdness, controlled emotion. It is better than most novels, which is more than can be said for most long poems.

The Author. In 1916 "Emanuel Morgan" and "Anne Knish" published Spectra, a little book of free verse so cleverly written it fooled many a critic into serious praise. "Anne Knish" was Arthur Davison Ficke; "Emanuel Morgan" was Witter Bynner. A Harvardman, tall and dark, with a high, shining forehead, Bynner has been through the literary mill: as assistant editor of McClure's Magazine, advisory editor to publishers, instructor of English, lecturer on poetry. His two sidelines are poetry and American-Indian and Chinese art. With Kiang Kang-hu he translated a Chinese anthology, Jade Mountain. He lives in Santa Fe, N. Mex.. in the midst of Chinese jade, Mexican scrapes, Navajo rugs. He likes to play the piano, laugh and sing. Other books: Young Harvard, Grenstone Poems, The Beloved Stranger, A Canticle of Pan, Caravan.

When the Phi Beta Kappa Society met this year at Amherst, Phi Beta Kappas heard and applauded Member Bynner's Eden Tree.

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