Shaky Bridge

PLEASURE DOME (372 pp.) -- Lloyd Frankenberg--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

Poet-Critic Lloyd Frankenberg started with a good idea. He would write a plain-spoken book to "provide a bridge to modern poetry for readers . . . brought up on prose." And since "poetry is an art of the ear's discrimination," he would persuade a record company to issue an album of readings by the poets discussed in his book. The result: this batch of essays on modern poetry and an identically titled album (Columbia, 8 sides, $4.95; or LP, $4.85) of readings by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and other modern poets.

Since Frankenberg doesn't mean Pleasure Dome to be profound literary criticism, and since it isn't, it can be judged by only one standard: Does it really help the ordinary intelligent reader--the kind who might tackle a Faulkner novel but shies away from an Eliot poem--to understand and enjoy 20th Century poetry?

Moods & Mechanics. Holding the reader firmly but not condescendingly by the hand, Frankenberg plunges directly into the work of the modern poets. In an illuminating essay on T. S. Eliot he anticipates and answers many of the questions readers are likely to ask about Eliot's poetry. He shows in detail how Eliot mixes pretentious eloquence and street slang, ancient myths and snatches of borrowed verse to portray an age of "social fright." As Frankenberg traces Eliot's poetic development from weary irony to religious faith, the reader does learn something about the moods and mechanics of modern poetry.

Similarly, Frankenberg shows how Poet E. E, Cummings intends his wrenchings of language, typography and punctuation as devices to praise the individual "human" in man and to satirize his faceless "public" front; how the delicate verses of Poetess Marianne Moore pounce on details of sight and touch in a way prose seldom does ("the blades of the oars moving together like the feet of water-spiders").

But midway through Pleasure Dome in an essay on Insuranceman-Poet Wallace Stevens, Frankenberg suddenly takes a deep dive into little-magazine jargon, while the eager reader waits expectantly on the bridge between prose and poetry. Author and reader never quite meet again, and from here on, if the reader is to get across that bridge, he has to do it by himself.

The Records. The album of records accompanying Frankenberg's book is good & bad in about the same proportions as the book itself. Unfortunately, poets are not necessarily the best readers of their work. Poetess Moore reads her verse as if she had just been frightened by a ferocious rabbit, Poetess Elizabeth Bishop as if she were a bored high-school sophomore, Poet Cummings as if he were an English gentleman slightly repelled by his own rowdy verses, and Poet-Physician William Carlos Williams as if he were droning out a prescription for a head cold.

The cause of poetry is somewhat redeemed by English Poet Dylan Thomas and by T. S. Eliot. Thomas reads with a rich, controlled romantic lilt, and Eliot's dramatic rendering of a passage from The Waste Land makes it suddenly spring to excited life. The reader begins to discover the pleasures poetry can sometimes yield without guides, crutches or bridges.

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