Books: Pathetic Fallacy

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES—Lionel Wiggam— Viking ($1.75).

Of all the fallacies which man hugs to his bosom, the one characterized by Ruskin as "the pathetic fallacy" is the most common to romantic poets. As generally applied, "the pathetic fallacy" imputes to Nature the appropriate emotional states of the despairing, joyful or ironic poet. Poe's croaking ravens and ghastly rushing rivers were clear examples; T. S. Eliot used the same stage effects in more modern terms. Last week a new poet struck his lyre, and to ears that could remember echoes, the minor strains were far older than Ruskin. Not so much for his gently conventional verse as for his U. S. background was Poet Lionel Wiggam notable. Twenty-year-old son of a welterweight champion and a farmer's daughter, he entered Northwestern University at 15, left to play in a stock company, hang wallpaper, work on a road-gang, as a janitor; went back to college on a scholarship when his poems began to be published. Meantime he was leading a literary double life as pseudonymous writer of lurid tales for the pulp magazines.

His 58 poems, well-titled Landscape with Figures, are talented, precocious watercolors. Poet Wiggam writes smoothly, very occasionally ventures such an arresting image as:

Where dusk approaches like a locust-swarm

Spreading its copper rumor down the air.

No desperate yea-sayer but a romantic for all that, it is still for him a matter of poetic note that

Nothing rebels: the ascendant rose must halt,

The wing and weed be indiscriminately rust . . .