Reviewed by Michael Lind

Sunday, March 31, 2002; Page BW08

DARLINGTON'S FALL
By Brad Leithauser
Knopf. 311 pp. $25

Narrative verse is often mistakenly assumed to have died out in the 17th or 18th century, when the prose novel replaced the verse epic. In fact, narrative poetry flourished in the 19th century, when the poetic tales of Byron, Longfellow, Tennyson and William Morris sold better than most novels. In the United States in the early 20th century, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Stephen Vincent Benet published bestselling book-length narrative poems, while Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers kept the tradition of the verse tale alive.

A prejudice against fiction in verse prevailed only in the decades following World War II, when poetry became synonymous with lyric poems written in free verse rather than meter, with or without rhyme. Unfortunately, the mid-20th-century dogma that treats novels and short stories in prose and lyric poems as the only viable genres of contemporary literature continues to influence many academics and old-fashioned book review editors. But beginning in the 1970s, when George Keithley's The Donner Party found a wide readership, there has been a quiet renaissance of narrative verse outside the ghetto walls of academic poetry.

Accomplished narrative poems have been written in a surprising variety of genres, ranging from Vikram Seth's delightful verse novel The Golden Gate (1986) and Frederick Turner's science-fiction epics The New World (1985) and Genesis (1988) to the brief verse narratives of Dana Gioia. Darlington's Fall is a distinguished contribution to the revival of narrative poetry in our time. The author of five previous novels and four volumes of poetry, Brad Leithauser unites his skill as a storyteller with his craft as a poet in this gentle and elegant novel in verse. The story follows the career of an American naturalist, Russel Darlington, from his boyhood in 1895 through catastrophe and heartbreak to a poignant romance late in his life in 1933.

Natural science is as much the subject of the novel as the vocation of its main character, who undergoes his struggles in a Darwinian universe from which the consolations of myth and religion have been driven by intellectual labors such as those of Darlington himself. Although this is a novel rather than an epic, mock-epic or didactic poem, it is a novel in verse, with its own unique set of technical challenges. Even long verse narratives tend to be succinct, compared to their prose counterparts. Leithauser narrates most of a life in less than 50,000 words by concentrating on a few selected incidents and tableaux -- rather like the dioramas representing different ages in the life of the Earth in Darlington's natural history museum.

The standard, and if truth be told, somewhat stale medium for many contemporary verse narratives is blank verse -- unrhymed iambic pentameter, like that in Shakespeare's plays or Milton's Paradise Lost. Leithauser, whose previously published lyric poetry demonstrates a delight in intricate verse forms, takes on the more difficult challenge of telling his story in 10-line stanzas with variable and often indirect or consonant end rhymes ("conclude/load," for example). He sometimes succumbs to the temptation to pad out a stanza with a run-on sentence or an unnecessary parenthetical aside. At his best, however, Leithauser is able to employ his stanzas effectively to narrate action ("Head spinning, arms spinning, and then:/ Crisp blows of lightning, inner splinterings/ & the bright exploding blindess") and conversation:

He (with stammering urgency): How are you, Pauline?

She (smiling brightly): Cold, I spose. Refrigerated.

But tell me (mock-solemnly), how are all the bugs?

He (treating the question gravely): Complicated.

Poetic art helps Leithauser to meet what is perhaps the greatest challenge confronting a novelist whose character lives as much in the mind as in the world. The ancient resources of verse lend glamour and solidity to what might have been a prosaic description of the joy of discovery:

To be a young man in a young field . . . Only now

This science of entomology, with its prize

Subdiscipline, the Lepidoptera, is beginning

To take wing. Only now, all of it banding

Together: embryology, taxonomy, mor-

phology, zoogeography . . . Since long before

The Greeks paid them the compliment of pinning

Their name to the very soul of man, butterflies

Have gripped the psyche; but now arrives the know-how

Needed to wed passion to understanding.

In this tour de force of the poet's craft, the names of academic disciplines resound with the exotic glamour of epic catalogue, and artful mythological allusion links the new world of science to the classical literary tradition. In Darlington's Fall, Brad Leithauser proves that the universe of science, no less than the inner life of the individual, can be the stuff of poetry. •

Michael Lind, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of a number of books of history, fiction and poetry, including "The Alamo: An Epic."