BOOKS
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I guess it is some corollary of James Dickey's concern for the
facts of experience that makes his verse so plain. The unrhymed lines
tend to have three beats, and are sometimes cut up into regular but
totally arbitrary stanzas-"The Ice Skin," for instance, alternates di–
visions of seven lines and three-none of them describing organic
divisions of the poem. This plainness puts as much pressure on the
verbal and rhythmic accuracy of the language as in free verse. Dickey
seems to welcome this attention to his insistent, unadorned observations
of experience which, through attention, becomes miraculous.
The poems and parts of poems that don't work are those where
he is making heroic metaphors out of experience that doesn't come
off on that scale. A poem about "Kudzu," for example, strikes me as
badly overwrought, while other fine poems like "Springer Mountain"
and "The Scarred Girl" are extended beyond the range of their own
intensity.
But Dickey is in the clear as a poet. He knows a poem when
one happens to him and, like a small number of his talented con–
temporaries-James Merrill and W. D. Snodgrass, for instance-he
puts his name on it.
William Meredith
THE THEORY OF TALK
ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF SYNTAX. By Noem Chomsky. M.I.T. Press.
$7.50.
CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY. By Noem Chomsky. Mouton
8.
Co., The Hegue. $2.75.
AN INTEGRATED THEORY OF LINGUISTIC DESCRIPTIONS. By Jerrold
J. Ketz end Peul Postel. M.I.T. Press. $6.00.
The study of language comprises an array of diverse and
partly incompatible activities, clustered around a nearly vacant center:
that is, we have lacked a compelling theory to explain the fact-and the
way-that human beings speak. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, to be sure, philosophers and philologists explored the notion
of a universal grammar, rooted in universal categories of mind. But
empiricism sent innate ideas into eclipse; and as linguistic studies
