292
R. W.
FLINT
Ireland architecture ("... my fathers/ Would ride again to the Boyne/
Or with scythes to Sedgemoor, or splinter/The charming fanlights in
this charming slum/ In their lights, rightly."), why Bertrand Russell's
Cambridge produced no poets, and so on. On this theme he can be
both witty and lower-case wise; witty in "The Evangelist", for instance:
You round upon me, generously keen:
The man, you say,
is
patently sincere.
Because he
is
so eloquent, Yo'U mean?
That test was never patented, my dear.
If, when he plays upon our sympathies,
I'm pleased to be fastidious, and you
To be inspired, the vice in it
is
this:
Each does us credit, and we know it too.
and wise in "The Life of Service", a poem on a horribly long-suffering,
tenacious English shrub that Mr. Davie makes into a sufficiently ghastly
symbol of all the ghastliness his generation has set its face against.
"Dissentient Voice," a long poem in four sections, is also very good.
Ashbery and Davie are schoolmen in some distinct way. Mr. Dickey
is a loner, in a tradition, of course--somewhat resembling Stevens, Jarrell,
Merwin, Wright-but his emotions are often so well matched to his
imagination, and expand, in many poems, so harmoniously with a
vigorous and spacious play of images that the poet's relative lack of
craft is more easily forgotten than another's superabundance of it.
I hope this judgment is more than prejudice in favor of Dickey'S
cult of nature, his deep and narrow piety for family, the dead, mono–
gamous love, the spirit of place and the souls of animals.
If
I knew
what was fashionable nowadays, I would call Dickey unfashionable
and pat him sheepishly on the back for it. But if this is the unironized
country of very early Ransom, it is also post-everybody in the degree
of its freedom from echoes. Mr. Dickey is not naive; his poetry strug–
gles to life out of uncharted depths of vacancy, perilous self-discipline
and a sort of intense, pious, harmless narcissism. As often
in
Stevens,
the minor poems seem to come only half awake; the poet sits
in
his
trance pushing his numinous counters around the board: Light, Holi–
ness, Fire, the Dead, Self, etc. He hunts a great deal, visits a Civil War
battlefield called Nimblewill Creek with a mine-detector to exhume
the dead, buries the dead on a Pacific island, cultivates pious ecstasy
with a singlemindedness that makes
pius
Aeneas look like James Michael
Curley. This is very American and special, to be sure. It is
echt Sewanee
