WHAT THERE IS TO BE SAID FOR IT: review

• Published in: The New York times 1983
• Main Authors: Poets.'', WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD, William H. Pritchard, who teaches English at Amherst College, is the author of ''Lives of the Modern
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: BOOKS AND LITERATURE; DEATH
• ISSN: 0362-4331

Nobody can read this book without wanting to propose for inclusion the bits Mr. [Enright] left out. Of these the most important is Wallace Stevens's stanza from ''Sunday Morning'' beginning ''Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires,'' which should surely have been in there instead of or along with the Stevens trifle (''The Worms at Heaven's Gate'') beginning ''Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour.'' And in the section ''Hereafters'' is quoted an exchange from Boswell's ''Life of Johnson'' in which Johnson is asked what he means by being ''damned'' and replies, ''Sent to hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.'' So I thought of a memorable moment of such punishment in Wyndham Lewis's ''Malign Fiesta'' and the trials of poor Ellerbee in Stanley Elkin's harrowing ''Living End.'' And what about the omission of Mr. Enright's own, modest ''Small Oratorio,'' which begins engagingly and sensibly with ''Let there be pie / In the sky / When I die''? It is amazing how resilient some of these ultimate tales make one feel - for example, Voltaire's account of how a commentator on Lucretius named Creech noted on the manuscript, ''N.B. Must hang myself when I have finished.'' To which Voltaire adds, ''He kept his word, that he might have the pleasure of ending like his author. Had he taken on a commentary upon Ovid, he would have lived longer.'' A similarly exhilarating moment, this one about the hereafter, shows up from Bertrand Russell's ''Unpopular Essays,'' where a woman questioned about the state of her recently dead daughter's soul replies, ''Oh well, I suppose she is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects.'' There is also something salutary about coming across poetry put under a rubric and detached from its author's accompanying work. So Yeats's marvelous poem, ''An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,'' shone out here, as did Wordsworth's ''We Are Seven'' and John Crowe Ransom's ''Janet Waking.'' Ransom's poem is placed under the ''Children'' rubric, but since its most engaging character is ''Chucky,'' the dead pet hen, it could as easily have gone under ''Animals,'' one of the most interesting sections of this book. Here, although William Cowper is twice represented, I greatly missed his ''Epitaph on a Hare,'' in which ''Old Tiney, surliest of his kind'' is celebrated. And since I noted no other canary, it would have been nice to include Matthew Arnol