Professor's Poetry

THE ASSASSINS--Frederic Prokosch-- Harper ($2).

Last year readers with a taste for unusual prose and a willingness to search for cryptic significance in faction found a book that suited them perfectly in a first novel called The Asiatics. It was the work of a 78-year-old Yale professor, and it described the wanderings of an anonymous narrator from Persia to China, with careful and realistic descriptions of the extraordinary and unreal adventures he encountered on the way. These adventures ranged from a prison escape to casual encounters with the passionate overnight beauties of the Orient. Much of the strangeness of the book had its source in the author's ability to make the Continent of Asia seem somewhat like a small town, filled with the same gossipy characters turning up on every corner, with the same old feuds and underground activities that a stranger might be aware of, get involved in, but could not understand.

Last week Frederic Prokosch followed this unusual novel with a volume of 30 sombre poems no less unusual. Compelling attention by their bold use of language, their mastery of rhythm, their melancholy speculative tone--as well as by the inveterate ambiguity of their meaning--the verses included in The Assassins ranged from night thoughts on the shores of the Baltic to an evocation of Alexandria at noon, gave an impression of a strong talent somewhat overburdened with literary allusions and traditional poetic moods. Possessing none of the sardonic mockery that distinguishes so much post-War poetry. Frederic Prokosch writes of ruins that call to mind the brevity of human life, invokes the stars and the sea as symbols of permanence, speculates on the prehistoric innocence of African natives of

Long long ago, before our northern whales

Grew dangerous when they glimpsed those slender boats

Creep through the nightly waves, . . .

Although his language and his rhythms are modern, the world of this poet has much in common with that Gothic land of bleak plains, deserted cities, brooding cliffs and endless solitudes that characterized the poetic age of Byron.

The dominant note in his poetry is loneliness and isolation, sometimes symbolized by thought of distant places, the winds blowing over the plains of Siberia or Montana, sometimes by thoughts of Angkor Wat, "the lost cities, deep in the dead dark, no thought, no memory," sometimes by evocations of the end of history, when only birds will "sob for the time of man," sometimes by a vision of utter desolation:

This is the final dreading

Of history ending, an end to living and terror spreading,

The dead destroying, the living dying, the dream fulfilling,

The long night failing and knowledge failing and memory fading.

The Assassins reveals a wide range of technical accomplishment. In such poems as The Dolls or Alexandria the poet's lines and images are dry, economical, with more than a suggestion of the exactness and finality of some of the verses of T. S. Eliot. But in Going Southward, from which the lines above are quoted, the images are tropical and luxurious, the racing, unbroken, drumlike beat of the poem effectively suggesting the panic and horror of the world's end:

The delta rising, the isthmus widening,

the waters drying, The dead devouring, the fever settling,

the sufferers sighing, The loved unloving, the loved unlonging, the living dying And passion ended: . . .

The Poet: Born in Madison, Wis. 28 years ago, Frederic Prokosch is the son of Eduard Prokosch. Sterling Professor of Linguistics at Yale. Educated at various schools in the U. S. and Europe, Frederic Prokosch graduated from Haverford College at the head of his class at the age of 18, got his Ph. D. in English literature at Yale four years later. He taught at Yale from 1931 to 1933, held a fellowship there the next two years. He plays tennis expertly and was squash champion of Connecticut in 1933. For fun he paints, plays cricket and works marionettes. A constant traveler, he visited England after The Asiatics was published, stayed for a squash tournament, then went to Morocco to work on another novel.

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