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The Harvard Advocate

From the Shelf

Former Harvard tutor Richard Tillinghast authored the last of the great poems, "Ascension Day: Waking on the Train." The narrative viewpoint is clouded, seemingly drifting between dream and drowsy waking. In the transitions, a county-fair balloon ascension becomes associated with an erection the narrator wakes up with: "The man in the train compartment is to have an erection/ which in turn will cause the giant balloon to ascend." Meanwhile, soldiers on the train, who "always sleep erect/ as though in training for an awkward death," have become the subjects of negative antimilitary associations, and gun down the balloon erection.

W. H. Auden's "Dear Diary" is in the style of his About the House poems, the motives of which escape me, and which I gather perplex even his most devoted critics.

Howard Nemerov's "Two Academic Poems" display great humor and great wit, respectively, though I do not think they would suffer from being printed as prose.

Stephen Sandy's "Arena" has a great tactile con-cretion that works against a generally undefined setting to yield a sense of hallucinatory strangeness; the poet advances opaque ideas in deceptively simple language, apt to be accepted before its difficulty is recognized, as in "into the shifty sand and blank/ sky of us." I like this poem better than any of Sandy's except perhaps the Breughel poem published in the New Yorker a few weeks ago.

Gary Snyder presents an interesting case, interesting perhaps to study in the light of Barber's theories about aggression. Snyder is a charismatic, gleeful, booming-voiced, hyper-energetic Adonis of a man, very sharp-witted, very profound, a long-time student of Zen in Kyoto, and a poet who despite militant political leftism gives the impression of being the best-adjusted man on earth. Yet I don't think he's much of a poet, and I can't help feeling he's perhaps too much of a man, in the sense that Yeats was suggesting (as Barber quotes him here) when he said that man "is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life, or of the work."

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Rather than completing the roll call of poems, I would like to eulogize the lay-out of this issue in general, the best I have seen in any Advocate and several pieces of the art-work in particular. Freshman Terry Furchgott's cover Pegasus gives the winged-horse intriguing stylized pectoral muscles, and a mane that looks more like the tresses of Beardsley maidens. John Lithgow's angel woodcut is the most beautiful piece of art I have seen him create. Another smaller woodcut of three musicians appears later, and though not credited, looks like Lithgow's work.

Under this later woodcut appear the enigmatic words: "BLAKE KNEW. Do you?"

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