ON JAMES DICKEY by Richard Howard
[Continued from Page 428]
H ere Dickey has succeeded, in his account of the characteristic spiritual
journey or
ascensus,
in reconciling the starkest vocabulary of transcend–
ence with the lush nature of the backwoods country. It is a moment of
astonishing equilibrium in the poet's long quest, enriched in the final
section, "The Inundation," with a remembered rescue from the rapids by
another Wordsworthian figure, "the strange woods boy" Lucas Gentry:
Who may have been the accepting spirit of the place
Come to call us to higher ground,
Bent too raise
Us from the sle,ep of the yet-to-be-drowned,
There, with the black dream of the dead canoe
Over our fac es.
In thematic control, in sureness of their subject, these are poems so
resolved that one would be at a loss-and quite happy to be there--to
define the point where the poet's abiding struggle with himself might be
located, were it not for the aura of incantation, of litany that Dickey
still employs, even though he has steadily, painfully rid himself of the
ritual imagination. Or rather, even though he has rejected the ritual as
something given, and has instead cast it ahead of himself as something
to be found, invented. By the end of
Helmets,
the litaneutical measure is
disputed, the steady beat of the three- and four-foot lines, altered only
by dactyl or spondee teleutons and generally matching line length with
sense unit, is breaking up. Moreover the long, regularly shaped stanzas
give way to clusters of verse separated in arbitrary ways by blanks-as
if the poet were reluctant to let the cadences coincide with the reader's
breath, but must hurry him on when he would pause, slow him down
just when he would gather momentum. What in the earlier books had
sunk, with great virtuosity in diction, with what Gide called a
«diverse
monotonie"
into the ear to do its murmurous work is now offered in a
less convinced form, or turned, as in "Cherrylog Road," to less reverent
purposes. In this comic poem about meeting a forbidden sweetheart in
