For in Reznikoff, lives, cityscapes, testimonies, tend to remain resolutely what they are, to resist being read analogically or metaphorically. Particularly in the urban poetry, there is a sealed character to the contents of the work, one that is full of sorrow, of a judging sorrow and tenderness, which understands personality, even that of fools and villains, and yet accepts.

The success of Testimony becomes all the more striking when placed beside Holocaust, a far less satisfying work that is based on many of the same techniques. Using as his sources the U.S. Government publication, Trials of the Criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunal, and the records of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Reznikoff attempts to deal with Germany's annihilation of the Jews in the same dispassionate, documentary style with which he had explored the human dramas buried in American court records. The problem, I think, is one of magnitude.

I wrote him wildly enthusiastic letters, soliciting work for Montemora, offering him as much space as he liked in the magazine; the manuscripts he sent in reply always contained a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Dear Jean-Paul Auxeméry,

[. . .]

That Reznikoff's world is one of endless wreckage becomes all too clear in his long poems, Testimony and Holocaust. In both, "wreckage upon wreckage" are hurled at our feet. The poems, particularly Holocaust, could be regarded as the endpoint of Objectivism's testimonial strain, as the subjectivity and presence of the poet virtually disappears, replaced by the dispassionate court records from which the texts are drawn.

Reed's poem is structured as an inverted epic. The three stanzas that follow the second one consider the failure of synthesis. Isis, like Leda, gives birth to war, and the ringmanship of Ezzard Charles is defeated. The fifth stanza then acknowledges the exile of art. This pattern is in fact closer to Blake's satiric meditation on the impossibility of art and the failure of Los in a fallen world in The Book of Urizen (1794). In reversing the transcendent sequence of Milton, Reed dramatizes the pressures of history and the social upon the ideal of the synthetic imagination.

The almost nonconnotative "bruited," the humor of the geese scuttling "goose-fashion," lend the distance, the perspective the poem has to have, especially after such an opening line. We realize slowly that the poem is not a simple elegy, that the grief is not so great as the consternation and wonder. The "brown study" "astonishes" us; we are vexed, but we are vexed more at the turning of quickness into stillness than at the loss of the little girl herself, and we are taken most with the contrast between the stillness of the girl and the scuttling of the geese.

A plausible fiction sustained by an exactly appropriate narrator accounts for the parallel success of "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter." "Little body" in the first line is perilously close to obvious pathos, but this effect is counteracted by the word "speed," which begins an important motif. The reader's accruing sense of loss in "Dead Boy" is gleaned through the negative impression of the narrator, and a similar technique is used in this poem. The narrator, again, is capable of a considerable emotional distance from the death.

"Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" (1924), Ransom's best-known poem, is also one of his best, one that Randal Jarrell has called "perfectly realized . . . and almost perfect." Like many of Ransom's other poems, this one is on the precariousness of human life, the fleetingness of feminine beauty. It demonstrates a quality of Ransom's artistry that Graham Hough has noted: the poet's ability to present important problems through delicate subject matter.

Far from being a simple pessimist, however, Ransom has the positive intention of making the reader face up to the sobering facts of existence without having recourse to the kind of consolation traditionally offered by religious belief. It is especially significant in this regard that his many poems on death have a somewhat different background than might appear at first. All of them are motivated by a philosophic purpose that he had entertained certainly when composing Poems About God and probably long before that.