Word: taggard
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...poetasters, poeticules, and the function of communication mean? Not much I think, except your own sense of power-for one issue-over persons whom you obviously don't understand nor even recognize. Jeffers is a vasty poetaster, William Carlos Williams is a poetaster, Prokosch is an accomplished poetaster, Taggard is empty, nondescript, Donald Davidson is poeticulous, Fearing is a poeticule, say you. Where is your badge for all this authority? Probably it's a book by I. A. Richards or perhaps the history of the French Academy...
Your criticism of poets like Jeffers and Taggard-and I imagine you would include Lola Ridge, Tagore, Anna Hempstead Branch and others called mystical and "metaphysical" -unerringly indicates your own limitation as critic. You simply missed the boat so far as they are concerned, and in my humble opinion you always will miss it, so long as your ideas of poetry are based on semantics...
...courtesy than that of the smart epithet. You have shown, in your excellent reviews of the poetry of Cummings and Garcia Lorca, that you can describe verse intelligently and soberly. Consequently it is all the more disheartening to read your high-school wisecrack dismissals of Dr. Williams and Miss Taggard-writers whose long service to American poetry certainly deserves more consideration than you seem willing to pay it. No one will quarrel with reasoned, documented condemnation; what is really immoral is this arbitrary fixing of labels-"poetaster," "poeticule," "ham" (in a recent "review" of unhappy memory)-and then forcing...
Genevieve Taggard, teacher (at Sarah Lawrence College), biographer (of Emily Dickinson), editor (of The Measure, a magazine of verse) last month published her Collected Poems (Harper, $2.50). With her rich literary background and varied social experience, she writes as one who feels that she is expected to say something rich and varied. Her poems are stopgaps for silence-what their author apparently feels would be an embarrassing silence. But since silence speaks louder than stopgaps, her poems give a net impression of saying nothing. Her lyrics, whether addressed to Nature or to Man, all share the same insufficiency...
...COLLECTED POEMS-Genevieve Taggard-Harper...