478
G. S.
FRASER
tion have to have their hands tied. They have a habit of beating at their
eyeballs. Why? The therapist says they like the color flashes and after–
images this produces. The rationalist in Dickey says that perhaps they
want to blind themselves, because, like Oedipus, they cannot bear to
look upon our world. The poet in him invents a more poetic explana–
tion, they are trying to recreate a vision of a primitive world, bears,
caves, spears, more exciting, more simple, if also more
obviously
mur–
derous, than ours. Perversely, as he admits, Dickey junks reason, and
prefers poetic invention: his explanation may not be true.
There is a complexity of mind in Dickey quite lacking in Hughes,
though because of that complexity, not quite an equal punch-up power.
I think Dickey dilutes too many of his poems with perhaps biographical–
ly or topographically interesting but poetically irrelevant circumstantial
detail, and, indeed, his main poetic strategy may be that given enough
adventitious detail, shove everything in, the poem, unplanned, will form
itself naturally into a whole. Gary Snyder is the opposite, writing the
same neat, tight imagist poem over and over again, so that his volume
as a whole seems less, not more, than the sum of its discrete parts: no
modulation or development. Also I notice that queerly the imagistic
poem, when it is about somewhere that one knows, like Kyoto,
doesn't
give one a picture: for evocation of place, old-fashioned descriptive verse
is better. I feel that Snyder, like Hughes, is one of the poets whom the
young enormously overrate, perhaps because they fear complexity.
Ladies last. Denise Levertov has an easy and natural fluency, and
a warm maternal heart, in exactly the right place, but does go on
rather: full of the female wisdom that intuitively knows the
what,
and
is not troubled by the intellectual male
how.
One gets an occasional fit
of the Mother-Smothers. May Swenson, by contrast, is jokey. I en–
joyed the whimsical typographical layout (John Hollander does it
better) and some of the poems, like the one about the greedy girl at the
James Bond movie, made me laugh aloud. But my deep sympathies,
obviously, up to Logan, are with the poets on this list who, however
imperfectly they succeed sometimes, do at least try to do it in the
"old high style." At some stage every critic, to adapt de Gourmont,
must generalize his prejudices into rules: it is safe enough for the reader
if he knows what the prejudices are.
G. S. Fraser
