I

T.S.ELIOT once said of Samuel Johnson that, solely on the basis of his poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes," he could be considered a major poet. Johnson's poem appeared as a twenty-eight page leaflet in 1749, and was the first of his published works to bear his name on the title page. Obviously he had no previous reputation as a poet, nor do most people remember him as one, though Boswell somewhere speaks of Johnson as "perpetually a poet" (a statement intended to refer to his quality of mind. The only two poems which appear to have survived in editors anthologies and readers affections are "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," both based on satires of Juvenal.

We have now a new version of the second century Roman's tenth satire, published as "The Vanity of Human Wishes" by the distinguished American poet Robert Lowell in Near the Ocean. This little book seems to me the outstanding production in what as Frank Sinatra recently said, "was a very good year"--for American poetry as well as for small-town girls. I think particular of the impressive collection of Robert Penn Warren, carrying us from 1923 to 1966 (Selected Poems)and the delicate one of Marianne Moore (Tell Me. Tell Me). To return to Lowell: not only does he give us new proof of his skill and originality in the form which he described in previous volume as imitation (not translation), this time from poems in Latin, Italian, and Spanish. He also demonstrates that the imaginative parturition of his mind is going steadily onward in the age of the pill. His new poems, and especially the five longer ones grouped under the title "Near the Ocean," show him as delightfully un-played out. Here is the first stanza of the collection (from "Waking Early Sunday Morning"):

O to break loose, like the Chinook salmon jumping and falling backnosing up to the impossible stone and bone-rushing waterfall--raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there stopped by ten

steps of the roaring ladder, and then to clear the top on the last try, alive enough to spawn and die.

Mr.Lowell has broken loose in a sense: I shall try to show this in speaking of Near the Ocean and the earlier books. He has indubitably spawned. But dying? Not a chance.

II

Let us consider first the second half of the book, including the version of Juvenal, three Horatian odes, the Brunetto Latini canto from Dante (Inferno XV),and four sonnets by the sixteenth century Spanish poets Gongora and Quevedo. I say versions because I do not think these poems belong in the class which Lowell described as imitations in the preface to his 1961 volume. There he concentrated on the transmission of tone, quoting Boris Pasternak's remark about the usual translator's sacrifice of tone to literal meaning. He then cautioned us to read Imitations as a book of original poems, with the communication of the tone, or of a tone, of their European ancestors as the major goal. Anyone who examines in French the Villon or the Baudelaire who then inspired Mr.Lowell will readily discover that he took great liberties. But I think most would agree that a tone emerged, in many cases very powerfully.

The Juvenal and Horace efforts in Near the Ocean now show Lowell as the proper envy of every translator in English: he has been able to have his cake and eat it. By this I mean that the relevance of Pasternak's remark, true enough for ordinary translators, has faded with respect of Lowell. Calling the poems "Translations" in the introductory more, and distinguishing among them the various degrees of freedom employed, he has managed to combine close fidelity to the literal text with tonal fidelity in an overwhelming percentage of lines and stanzas. And he has managed this working primarily with Latin, and language notoriously difficult for translators (witness the absence of any outstanding translation of the Aeneidsince 1967, when Dryden's was published).

Long ago J.W.Duff, one of the standard historians of Latin literature suggested that Juvenal's pointed hexameters might better be rendered in English with the use of blank verse than with the rhymed heroic couplet,Johnson notwithstanding. This, because blank verse, as the traditional meter of English narrative poetry might evoke for English readers of Juvenal what that poet, following the examples of Lucilius and Horace, evoked for Roman readers of satire: the suggestion of an ironic tone through the epic ring of the hexameter, used for very serious purposes by Lucretius and Virgil. Lowell has done exactly this, and sometimes achieves subtle effects with his rhythmical variation. Illustrating the latter are the first twelve lines of "The Vanity of Human Wishes" Note the suggestive variation of stress in the eleventh:

In every land as far as man can go from Spain to the Aurora or the poles few know, and even fewer choose what's true.

What do we fear with reason, or desire? Is a step made without regret? The gods

ruin whole households for a foolish prayer. Devoured by peace, we seek devouring war,

the orator is drowned by his torrential speech,

the gladiator's murder by his skill at murder. Wealth is worse: how many pile