from Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry (The University Press of Virginia, 2001)
James Dickey
Like his hero Theodore Roethke, James Dickey aspired to adjust to his features a larger-than-life persona, willing to attempt reconciling the heaviness of mansculinity with the sensitivity of the poetic mind, the lustful manipulations of the Hemingway male with the humble soliticude of the lover, the violence of the hunter with the judgment of the victim. While such an ambition at first may have seemed supportable in an era favorable to self-promotion, it eventually had the effect of bringing up a different set of issues, namely of artistic privilege, gender assumptions, and class prerogatives. In spite of considerable personal overhead, of which alcohol played its usual part, it was Dickey’s achievement to open a new territory in which his poems bear witness to the soul’s longing for authenticity in spite of the backwards tug of the psych—as if retrograde were a motion truer to the human animal. In spite of sometimes foul critical weather, especially in the years following his greatest fame, it has been, in turn, the genius of his poetic body of work to have seemed strong enough somehow to rescue the poet from his own limitations. Whether this impression will become a durable reality for this poet remains to be seen. Be that as it may, “Big Jim” Dickey wrote som e of the most arresting poems of the post-War period. His affinity for the elemental feel of things, for the wills not yet blighted by consciousness, no less than for the unspoken bonds that unite the animate to the inanimate, and his courage in exploring the by-no-means-certain borders between our desires and their objects, all contributed to the intensity of feeling and purpose that all readers feel in his poems.
If Randall Jarrell gave destinies to the ordinary lives put at risk in the Second World War, Dickey, who was involved in over a hundred major bombing raids in the Pacific theater, saw those lives as acquiring, and abiding by private rituals contrived to accommodate the psyche wounded by war. The poem, “The Performance,” from his first collection, Into the Stone (1960), records the “strange joy” evoked by the acrobatic feats of a prisoner-of-war shortly before he is beheaded by his Japanese captors. Similarly, in “Drinking from a Helmet,” from Dickey’s third collection, Helmets (1964),the poet drinks from the helmet of a dead soldier and with its baptismal waters running over his face, he imagines a communion with the dead that confers a momentary sense of peace before returning to his role as warrior. At the same time, there is a strange and more troubling joy attaching to the warrior’s expert stroke—almost artistic in its sureness. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of Dickey’s art, and yet it is also a secret source of his power as an artist. It is as if he wants to suggest that there is another goal complicit with our knowledge that lies, in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “beyond good and evil,” and that exists to complete human destiny in ways not recognized by society, which is based on ethics—indeed, ways that must be secured at the expense of ethical values. Which is not to say such intimations have only a private application; it is rather to underscore out their vexed origin.
The roles of the pursuer and pursued supplied Dickey with a naturalized version of many of the concerns evoked by war: the nature of violence, the presence of ambivalent feelings in the face of moral imperatives, and the price of survival, to name a few. In such poems as “The Heaven of Animals” and “The Owl King,” the poet imagines a rectitude for violence not vulnerable to the sanctions of common morality. The ritual animals of his poems who are clear, even exalted in their purpose are Nietzschean figures, beyond good and evil—those human constructions, and yet while their examples would guide us, as the Owl King guides the blind child into a mastery of night, the poet can never fully relinquish his humanity, even with its willingness to compromise and its relentless predisposition toward guilt. These too (especially the latter) are great engines of the human will, and while this will may shrink from the purity of the animal, it alone is capable of art. It is art alone that gives Dickey license to undertake the transgressions of some of his poems, whose subject matter (the zest of killing [“The Firebombing”]; the attraction of bestiality [“The Sheep Child”]) can be as distasteful in paraphrase as the poems are haunting in execution, representing, as they do, the end points of longing.
While Dickey’s best-known poems chart a topical ground that stretches between existential struggle (e.g., war) and the desire to mythologize action, all can be said to have in common an uncompromising candor with respect to the speaking subject. The poet then uses the cultural mechanism of mythology to render the candor operable. Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to say that Dickey’s poems as a whole embody the management of violence—military, personal, or natural—as their principle. His preference for compact, dactylic trimeter lines suggest on the one hand the influence of Yeats (by way of his epigone Roethke) and on the other, the heroic meters of Homer and Virgil, the West’s foundational masters of war narrative. By halving the dactylic hexameter line, Dickey perhaps suggests a halving of its heroic idealism as well.
After the award-winning success of his Poems 1957-1967, Dickey turned to a new style already implicit in the later poems of that volume. Based to some extent on then widely discussed notions of “field” composition, the traditional line is expanded into groupings of words (largely coinciding with syntactic units) arranged in spatial, rather than grammatical, relation. The page is thus no longer treated as a prosodic grid, against which lines unfold in unquestioned (and, it was thought, unfelt) metrical procession. While field composition in part addresses the fragmentation of a culturally savvy, traditionally educated reading public, it runs into a problem often associated with artistic originality: the a question of how a text is to be read. If traditional verse assumes a tradition within and against which a poem is to be understood, non-traditional verse loses the resonance possible when a sounding board (loosely, a tradition) is in place. By the 1970s, however, readers of poetry were inured to experimentation in poetic form. Nevertheless, because Dickey’s best poems achieve an intensity directly related to the constraints of form, any “loosening” of it was bound to diminish the old sonorities, without a concomitant change in subject matter. With the undoubted exception of “Falling,” the poet’s startling interior monologue of a stewardess swept to her death over Kansas, the poet’s subsequent career suffered from a dissipation of stylistic means. The lax quickly turns into the prolix when the narrative impulse in poetry is equated in significance with lyric intensity.
Like many southerners, Dickey was drawn stories told on the summer porch, and if the second half of his poetic career fails to match the first, it saw the publication of two novels, one a minor masterpiece. When it was made into a movie, Deliverance gave Dickey a whole new audience, and as his early poetic reputation began an unjust decline, his later reputation seemed securely based on his authorship of a best-selling novel, in spite of a sustained output of poems. In 1978, Dickey read an inaugural poem for President Jimmy Carter, and by the 1980s he could revel in his role as southern cultural icon, with its good-old-boy and class connotations, so dear to earlier writers like Faulkner. Twice-married, Dickey sired three children, the eldest of which, Christopher, has written a memoir of his father’s troubles with fame and alcoholism. One of the few poets to spring from the world of advertising, Dickey, like many of his colleagues, assumed a number of writer-in-residence and teaching assignments, culminating in his position as a distinguished Professor of English at The University of South Carolina. Although remembered for his bardic performances, expansive personality, and occasionally boorish behavior, it is more probable that Dickey will be remembered for an intense lyricism bought at a price most would be unwilling to pay. Paraphrasing Flaubert in his final lecture, Dickey remarked of the poet’s checkered life that
You love so much more intensely and so much more vitally. And with so much more of a sense of meaning, of consequentiality, instead of nothing mattering. This is what is driving our whole civilization into suicide. The feeling that we are living existences in which nothing matters very much, or at all. . . But the poet is free is that. He is free of that.
Robert Penn Warren
The joke about Warren was to the effect that he was the oldest promising young poet in America—though he was born in 1905. Certainly his position as the youngest of the Fugitives did much to perpetuate this claim (as did his boyish appearance and red hair), especially as most of the other Vanderbilt Fugitives—poets Tate, Ransom, Davidson, and novelist Andrew Lytle—enjoyed a shining longevity. But by his death in 1989, “Red” Warren could legitimately lay claim to title Yale colleague Harold Bloom used to coronate him: “our most eminent man of letters.” Not only did this Kentuckian’s poetic career span nearly 60 years (putting him in range of one of his heroes, Thomas Hardy), his reception by the poetry reading public snowballed into an avalanche of official honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and the first U. S. Poet Laureateship. Curiously, it was not for his poetry that he was best known. Like his younger colleague James Dickey, Warren gained general fame for a work of fiction. The story of the rise and fall of a southern demagogue, All the King’s Men (1946) won Warren a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was made into popular movie that went on to win a Academy Award for Best Picture. In all, Warren wrote a dozen works of fiction, as well as history, criticism, and belles lettres. All the while he was publishing poetry (17 volumes in his lifetime), including three book-length narrative poems. One of the founders of the influential Southern Review at Louisiana State University, Warren helped create a climate for the minutely scrutinizing reading practice known as the New Criticism with the publication of the widely used textbooks, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), both coedited with Cleanth Brooks.
By the 1970, the New Criticism’s day had passed, to be replaced by deconstructive, new historicist, and feminist programs. Though Warren could comfortably have cushioned his retirement with a sackful of laurels, he instead pulled off one of the most authentic comebacks in American literary history. As renascences go, it was not without precedent, as Yeats had also spurred the Muse to requite his old age, and for reasons that, in retrospect, seem not entirely dissimilar. Warren’s poems are haunted by the divergence of body and mind, and indeed it is inevitable that just such a split seeks out a poetic version of Platonism to heal—or console—itself, an old and by-no-means-exhausted vein of ore in western literary culture. As in the case of Yeats, Warren is the figure of a poet whose desires, increasingly constrained by nature and time, fire the recording mind and the speculative imagination. The resulting quest in search of the “ineffable”—a knowledge just beyond speech (and made somehow truer by its unreachableness)—has its spiritual side too, yet Warren’s poems for the most part steer clear of religion proper. If poetry is already “spilt religion,” as Coleridge maintained, then Warren is not one concerned to siphon it back into religious bottles. Rather, he wields his dualism as his wedge into natural as well as metaphysical mysteries: the nature of love, the interplay of knowledge and experience, the grip of time, and the enigma of death. As he puts it in “Heart of Autumn”: My heart is impacted with a fierce impulse/ To unwordable utterance.”
In such poems as “Mortal Limit,” in which the poet longs for a visionary moment before a restoration of “the darkness of whatever we dream we clutch,” we feel the tug of skepticism. If our most prized and familiar certainties are made dreamlike in time’s flux, then it is natural to long for the timeless moment (“vision”). But isn’t the fluid nature of reality itself more “natural” to the human than timelessness, of which we have merely a notion and a desire? Perhaps the human would have no longing for the timeless moments were it not for the depredations brought on by time: in other words, no timelessness without the flux, no eternity without, first, time. In the early poem “Bearded Oaks,” lovers whose moments of intensity reflect the Marvellian timeless quality of their love learn that time must be used “to practice for eternity.”
It is the with intuitive understanding that such timelessness exists as a supreme invention of the mind that the poet comes to understand, as Yeats did, that both time and death are “constructions. ” That is, they exist with all their baggage of guilt, remorse, anticipation, and fear as subjects formatted for human contemplation. It is a practice quite at odds with the rest of creation, for when the hawk’s wing
Scythes down another day . . . we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy
With the gold of our error.
For all his wish to practice for eternity, the poet sees—not without envy—that the hawk’s wholeness stands in contrast to human division and self-division. As far as the rest of nature is concerned, thundering human History, with its misery and glory, is like “a leaking pipe” in a basement: something that stands in need of fixing. In posing the human dilemma under naturalistic auspices, Warren’s poems come clear of any metaphysical dependencies as surely as they relinquish the claim to any metaphysical rewards—except those appropriate to the wholly embodied creature: culture, self-knowledge, acceptance. In “Red-Tailed Hawk and Pyre of Youth,” the poet mounts a stuffed hawk he has hunted as a boy to preside—like’s Poe’s raven—over the books of his study. Returning years later to the scene of his precocious ambition, he decides to ceremonially immolate his old totem, reasoning, “What left/ To do but walk in the dark, and no stars.” Perhaps more than any recent poet, with the possible exception of Charles Wright, Warren shows a consistent body of work informed by a spiritual struggle in secular clothing. And like Wright, Warren is ever-mindful of the dangerous undertow of nostalgia. Still, per impssibile, he makes us aware of what a spiritual life may still find in quest, once the varnish of superstition and self-delusion have been assiduously—and yet not disrespectfully—scrubbed away.
James Dickey
Like his hero Theodore Roethke, James Dickey aspired to adjust to his features a larger-than-life persona, willing to attempt reconciling the heaviness of mansculinity with the sensitivity of the poetic mind, the lustful manipulations of the Hemingway male with the humble soliticude of the lover, the violence of the hunter with the judgment of the victim. While such an ambition at first may have seemed supportable in an era favorable to self-promotion, it eventually had the effect of bringing up a different set of issues, namely of artistic privilege, gender assumptions, and class prerogatives. In spite of considerable personal overhead, of which alcohol played its usual part, it was Dickey’s achievement to open a new territory in which his poems bear witness to the soul’s longing for authenticity in spite of the backwards tug of the psych—as if retrograde were a motion truer to the human animal. In spite of sometimes foul critical weather, especially in the years following his greatest fame, it has been, in turn, the genius of his poetic body of work to have seemed strong enough somehow to rescue the poet from his own limitations. Whether this impression will become a durable reality for this poet remains to be seen. Be that as it may, “Big Jim” Dickey wrote som e of the most arresting poems of the post-War period. His affinity for the elemental feel of things, for the wills not yet blighted by consciousness, no less than for the unspoken bonds that unite the animate to the inanimate, and his courage in exploring the by-no-means-certain borders between our desires and their objects, all contributed to the intensity of feeling and purpose that all readers feel in his poems.
If Randall Jarrell gave destinies to the ordinary lives put at risk in the Second World War, Dickey, who was involved in over a hundred major bombing raids in the Pacific theater, saw those lives as acquiring, and abiding by private rituals contrived to accommodate the psyche wounded by war. The poem, “The Performance,” from his first collection, Into the Stone (1960), records the “strange joy” evoked by the acrobatic feats of a prisoner-of-war shortly before he is beheaded by his Japanese captors. Similarly, in “Drinking from a Helmet,” from Dickey’s third collection, Helmets (1964),the poet drinks from the helmet of a dead soldier and with its baptismal waters running over his face, he imagines a communion with the dead that confers a momentary sense of peace before returning to his role as warrior. At the same time, there is a strange and more troubling joy attaching to the warrior’s expert stroke—almost artistic in its sureness. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of Dickey’s art, and yet it is also a secret source of his power as an artist. It is as if he wants to suggest that there is another goal complicit with our knowledge that lies, in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “beyond good and evil,” and that exists to complete human destiny in ways not recognized by society, which is based on ethics—indeed, ways that must be secured at the expense of ethical values. Which is not to say such intimations have only a private application; it is rather to underscore out their vexed origin.
The roles of the pursuer and pursued supplied Dickey with a naturalized version of many of the concerns evoked by war: the nature of violence, the presence of ambivalent feelings in the face of moral imperatives, and the price of survival, to name a few. In such poems as “The Heaven of Animals” and “The Owl King,” the poet imagines a rectitude for violence not vulnerable to the sanctions of common morality. The ritual animals of his poems who are clear, even exalted in their purpose are Nietzschean figures, beyond good and evil—those human constructions, and yet while their examples would guide us, as the Owl King guides the blind child into a mastery of night, the poet can never fully relinquish his humanity, even with its willingness to compromise and its relentless predisposition toward guilt. These too (especially the latter) are great engines of the human will, and while this will may shrink from the purity of the animal, it alone is capable of art. It is art alone that gives Dickey license to undertake the transgressions of some of his poems, whose subject matter (the zest of killing [“The Firebombing”]; the attraction of bestiality [“The Sheep Child”]) can be as distasteful in paraphrase as the poems are haunting in execution, representing, as they do, the end points of longing.
While Dickey’s best-known poems chart a topical ground that stretches between existential struggle (e.g., war) and the desire to mythologize action, all can be said to have in common an uncompromising candor with respect to the speaking subject. The poet then uses the cultural mechanism of mythology to render the candor operable. Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to say that Dickey’s poems as a whole embody the management of violence—military, personal, or natural—as their principle. His preference for compact, dactylic trimeter lines suggest on the one hand the influence of Yeats (by way of his epigone Roethke) and on the other, the heroic meters of Homer and Virgil, the West’s foundational masters of war narrative. By halving the dactylic hexameter line, Dickey perhaps suggests a halving of its heroic idealism as well.
After the award-winning success of his Poems 1957-1967, Dickey turned to a new style already implicit in the later poems of that volume. Based to some extent on then widely discussed notions of “field” composition, the traditional line is expanded into groupings of words (largely coinciding with syntactic units) arranged in spatial, rather than grammatical, relation. The page is thus no longer treated as a prosodic grid, against which lines unfold in unquestioned (and, it was thought, unfelt) metrical procession. While field composition in part addresses the fragmentation of a culturally savvy, traditionally educated reading public, it runs into a problem often associated with artistic originality: the a question of how a text is to be read. If traditional verse assumes a tradition within and against which a poem is to be understood, non-traditional verse loses the resonance possible when a sounding board (loosely, a tradition) is in place. By the 1970s, however, readers of poetry were inured to experimentation in poetic form. Nevertheless, because Dickey’s best poems achieve an intensity directly related to the constraints of form, any “loosening” of it was bound to diminish the old sonorities, without a concomitant change in subject matter. With the undoubted exception of “Falling,” the poet’s startling interior monologue of a stewardess swept to her death over Kansas, the poet’s subsequent career suffered from a dissipation of stylistic means. The lax quickly turns into the prolix when the narrative impulse in poetry is equated in significance with lyric intensity.
Like many southerners, Dickey was drawn stories told on the summer porch, and if the second half of his poetic career fails to match the first, it saw the publication of two novels, one a minor masterpiece. When it was made into a movie, Deliverance gave Dickey a whole new audience, and as his early poetic reputation began an unjust decline, his later reputation seemed securely based on his authorship of a best-selling novel, in spite of a sustained output of poems. In 1978, Dickey read an inaugural poem for President Jimmy Carter, and by the 1980s he could revel in his role as southern cultural icon, with its good-old-boy and class connotations, so dear to earlier writers like Faulkner. Twice-married, Dickey sired three children, the eldest of which, Christopher, has written a memoir of his father’s troubles with fame and alcoholism. One of the few poets to spring from the world of advertising, Dickey, like many of his colleagues, assumed a number of writer-in-residence and teaching assignments, culminating in his position as a distinguished Professor of English at The University of South Carolina. Although remembered for his bardic performances, expansive personality, and occasionally boorish behavior, it is more probable that Dickey will be remembered for an intense lyricism bought at a price most would be unwilling to pay. Paraphrasing Flaubert in his final lecture, Dickey remarked of the poet’s checkered life that
You love so much more intensely and so much more vitally. And with so much more of a sense of meaning, of consequentiality, instead of nothing mattering. This is what is driving our whole civilization into suicide. The feeling that we are living existences in which nothing matters very much, or at all. . . But the poet is free is that. He is free of that.
Robert Penn Warren
The joke about Warren was to the effect that he was the oldest promising young poet in America—though he was born in 1905. Certainly his position as the youngest of the Fugitives did much to perpetuate this claim (as did his boyish appearance and red hair), especially as most of the other Vanderbilt Fugitives—poets Tate, Ransom, Davidson, and novelist Andrew Lytle—enjoyed a shining longevity. But by his death in 1989, “Red” Warren could legitimately lay claim to title Yale colleague Harold Bloom used to coronate him: “our most eminent man of letters.” Not only did this Kentuckian’s poetic career span nearly 60 years (putting him in range of one of his heroes, Thomas Hardy), his reception by the poetry reading public snowballed into an avalanche of official honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and the first U. S. Poet Laureateship. Curiously, it was not for his poetry that he was best known. Like his younger colleague James Dickey, Warren gained general fame for a work of fiction. The story of the rise and fall of a southern demagogue, All the King’s Men (1946) won Warren a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was made into popular movie that went on to win a Academy Award for Best Picture. In all, Warren wrote a dozen works of fiction, as well as history, criticism, and belles lettres. All the while he was publishing poetry (17 volumes in his lifetime), including three book-length narrative poems. One of the founders of the influential Southern Review at Louisiana State University, Warren helped create a climate for the minutely scrutinizing reading practice known as the New Criticism with the publication of the widely used textbooks, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), both coedited with Cleanth Brooks.
By the 1970, the New Criticism’s day had passed, to be replaced by deconstructive, new historicist, and feminist programs. Though Warren could comfortably have cushioned his retirement with a sackful of laurels, he instead pulled off one of the most authentic comebacks in American literary history. As renascences go, it was not without precedent, as Yeats had also spurred the Muse to requite his old age, and for reasons that, in retrospect, seem not entirely dissimilar. Warren’s poems are haunted by the divergence of body and mind, and indeed it is inevitable that just such a split seeks out a poetic version of Platonism to heal—or console—itself, an old and by-no-means-exhausted vein of ore in western literary culture. As in the case of Yeats, Warren is the figure of a poet whose desires, increasingly constrained by nature and time, fire the recording mind and the speculative imagination. The resulting quest in search of the “ineffable”—a knowledge just beyond speech (and made somehow truer by its unreachableness)—has its spiritual side too, yet Warren’s poems for the most part steer clear of religion proper. If poetry is already “spilt religion,” as Coleridge maintained, then Warren is not one concerned to siphon it back into religious bottles. Rather, he wields his dualism as his wedge into natural as well as metaphysical mysteries: the nature of love, the interplay of knowledge and experience, the grip of time, and the enigma of death. As he puts it in “Heart of Autumn”: My heart is impacted with a fierce impulse/ To unwordable utterance.”
In such poems as “Mortal Limit,” in which the poet longs for a visionary moment before a restoration of “the darkness of whatever we dream we clutch,” we feel the tug of skepticism. If our most prized and familiar certainties are made dreamlike in time’s flux, then it is natural to long for the timeless moment (“vision”). But isn’t the fluid nature of reality itself more “natural” to the human than timelessness, of which we have merely a notion and a desire? Perhaps the human would have no longing for the timeless moments were it not for the depredations brought on by time: in other words, no timelessness without the flux, no eternity without, first, time. In the early poem “Bearded Oaks,” lovers whose moments of intensity reflect the Marvellian timeless quality of their love learn that time must be used “to practice for eternity.”
It is the with intuitive understanding that such timelessness exists as a supreme invention of the mind that the poet comes to understand, as Yeats did, that both time and death are “constructions. ” That is, they exist with all their baggage of guilt, remorse, anticipation, and fear as subjects formatted for human contemplation. It is a practice quite at odds with the rest of creation, for when the hawk’s wing
Scythes down another day . . . we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy
With the gold of our error.
For all his wish to practice for eternity, the poet sees—not without envy—that the hawk’s wholeness stands in contrast to human division and self-division. As far as the rest of nature is concerned, thundering human History, with its misery and glory, is like “a leaking pipe” in a basement: something that stands in need of fixing. In posing the human dilemma under naturalistic auspices, Warren’s poems come clear of any metaphysical dependencies as surely as they relinquish the claim to any metaphysical rewards—except those appropriate to the wholly embodied creature: culture, self-knowledge, acceptance. In “Red-Tailed Hawk and Pyre of Youth,” the poet mounts a stuffed hawk he has hunted as a boy to preside—like’s Poe’s raven—over the books of his study. Returning years later to the scene of his precocious ambition, he decides to ceremonially immolate his old totem, reasoning, “What left/ To do but walk in the dark, and no stars.” Perhaps more than any recent poet, with the possible exception of Charles Wright, Warren shows a consistent body of work informed by a spiritual struggle in secular clothing. And like Wright, Warren is ever-mindful of the dangerous undertow of nostalgia. Still, per impssibile, he makes us aware of what a spiritual life may still find in quest, once the varnish of superstition and self-delusion have been assiduously—and yet not disrespectfully—scrubbed away.