Enemy of the Unreal

...Dickey is equally good on matters of style...

...It seems it is not so much a System that a critic needs, as the ability to discover reasons for his responses...

...Indeed without them, American poets might still be straining to express themselves in iambic pentameter...

...The pieces join up like the fragments of a puzzle to reveal a personality, a sensibility, that is amiable and sharp, intelligent and passionate...

...Nevertheless, a generally satisfactory critic like Dickey makes one marvel at his equipment...

...the medium may be the message, but the Other is its source...

...Dickey often is) than to his potential audience, to readers who must be invited or warned away...

...But it is astonishing that he should be unreceptive to the objectivists, projectivists, and breath-line poets who have come out of the overcoats of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound...

...Dickey is also unjust to John Ashbery, one of the best of the "New York school" of poets (which includes the formidable talents of Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Thomas Clark...

...The brevity is a virtue, for Dickey knows how to be concise, how to say a great deal in a little space...

...author, "American Poetry Since 1945" James Dickey was winner of the National Book Award for poetry in 1966, and is currently Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress...

...Dickey also hates calculated effects of the kind one finds in the poems of Thom Gunn, who seems to work by force of will rather than imagination...

...Ashbery is mannered and cute and plays games, Dickey charges, seemingly unaware of the frontier-breaking quality of Ashbery's talent, of the extraordinary risks he takes with language and the extraordinary burdens he imposes on it...

...There are longer essays as well, though, on E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, and five explications of individual poems by Christopher Smart, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, and William Carlos Williams...

...He addresses himself less to the poet whose work he is characterizing (though he may be useful to him...

...He is now moving toward "the conclu-sionless poem, the open or ungen-cralizing poem, the un-well-made poem," he declares, and this would seem to be the right direction...

...Though it may be true that there is more darkness than light in the breath-line theory, it is still less important that a theory be right than that it inspire good poetry—and there is no doubt it has inspired good poetry...

...instead, there is that of ingenuity, manipulation...

...He is impatient with artificiality of style and elegance for the sake of display...

...Miss Derwood's poems seldom give the sustained illusion that, reached through language, the matter realized by the poem has made language itself irrelevant," he complains...

...Ashbery is actually one of the subtlest, most sophisticated, and most innovative of contemporary poets...

...Reading the book is an absorbing experience, because of the opinions Dickey expresses and the insights he offers into the obsessions and energy-draining difficulties of the poetic process...

...Some of his reviews have been republished by the Sixties Press as The Suspect in Poetry (1964), but Babel to Byzantium is the first comprehensive collection of both his essays and reviews...

...This emphasis on the living and the particular recurs in Dickey's criticism, marking him as a staunch enemy of the unreal...

...In the third, he describes his development as a poet, his groping toward individuality of statement and rhythm by way of a guitar-and-song-inspired anapestic line...

...He dislikes baroque elaboration and conceit-involution of the sort one finds in Gene Derwood and (Catherine Hoskins, for he regards all such wordiness as a smoke screen between the poet and his subject...

...The book ends with three engrossing essays of an autobiographical nature...

...He must show how the form of the poem embodies significant tensions of opposites in action, character, thought, language, and background, and he must demonstrate the appropriateness of the parts to the whole (or...

...Dickey's work as a reviewer and critic, however, is relatively unknown, even though he has been noting, evaluating, and wringing his hands over contemporary poetry for the past 12 years in periodicals like the Sewanee Review, Poetry, and the Virginia Quarterly Review...

...he notes the "needless artificiality, prim finickiness, and determined inconsequence of it all...

...What strikes one here is that James Dickey is a far better critic than one remembers from his occasional appearances in the little magazines...

...He writes like a man who cares deeply about the poetry of his contemporaries...

...His response to Burke is funny but persuasive: "You become a little restive," he observes "over the possibility that these simple-seeming and innocuous poems might have, threaded into them in God knows what ways, the whole corpus of human thought...

...Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov, poets who have literally redirected the course of American poetry over the past 15 years...

...In the second, he responds affirmatively to the forces of humanism in the South that are transforming race relations and giving new dignity, equality, and value to the black man and to black society...

...On analyzing Burke's figures of speech, Dickey says, bluntly, "There is little sense of necessity in his figures...

...The collection consists, in large part, of short reviews of poets such as Randall Jarrell, Reed Whittemore...

...In the first of the sketches, Dickey tells of his comic and somewhat sobering experiences as a poetry reader on a college circuit in the Middle West...

...His considerable fame as a poet is based on five books of verse, all published since 1960, in which he describes with remarkable sanity his experience as a flyer in World War II and the Korean War, his relations with members of his family (notably his father, whom he visits as he lies dying in a hospital), and his enjoyment of landscapes and outdoor activities such as hunting in his native South...

...His distrust of rationality and intellectual maneuver, which sometimes lead to the deserts of abstraction, is likewise evident in his remarks on Samuel French Morse: "It seems to me that the fault lies in Morse's having his eye consistendy on the end, the Larger Sense, the Proposition, the General Truth, instead of on the concrete presentation of his subject in its living and particular identity...

...in addition, like the other members of his school, he has a wild sense of humor that finds incongruity everywhere...

...While recognizing the superb gifts of James Merrill and Anthony Hecht, for instance, he finds their refinement unsatisfactory...

...He must tell them whether a poem is alive or not, whether it is true, whether it is better or worse than other poems by the same poet and others...

...If our poets now describe the surfaces and depths of American reality in the authentic idiom and speech rhythms of the American language, that is due in large part to the theory and its practice...

...Writing a poem, he says, is not "simply inventing a complex proposition about life or one of its manifestations, and illustrating it with whatever material appears to fit in...

...The collection is impressive for its rigor, range and gusto, for the critic's discriminating attack on the pretentious and shoddy, and for his enthusiasm over whatever is genuine and convincing...

...sometimes, the attractiveness of the resistance of the parts to the whole ). James Dickey does not do all of these things every time, of course, yet he is always aware of his responsibility...

...One tends to agree with most of Dickey's adverse judgments—for example, his dislike of the excessively rational, complicated verse of Kenneth Burke, Herbert Read, or William Empson...

...Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton, Charles Olson, William Stafford, W. S. Merwin, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, Louis Simpson, John Berryman, and Robert Duncan...

...He must go to the words of the poem and then to the universe of causes, effects, textures, and climates that they represent...

...One tires very quickly of the exquisite, nonvital kind of sensibility...

...Dickey is insufficiently respectful of the accomplishments of Charles Olson...

...Reading him is an authentic expansion of consciousness...

...His own success as a poet gives him an authority in these matters that one can only respect...

...Nor can one quarrel with Dickey for being severe with the beat poets, since there is a difference, after all, between prophecy and the awkward straining toward prophecy that one gets in their work...