was dedicated to the proposition.
Girls were his charity and he gave till it hurt.
Whatever he did to himself was second nature.
First nature now is treating him like dirt.

(“Epitaph for a Ladies’ Man”)

To be sure. He is. It is. It’s just that unlike Sweden or Kentucky or Vermont, comparably wholesome places where farmer poets, nature poets, elegists, and wits have lately thriven, Washington seems a state of mind where all conventions, nature's as well as man's, of outer as much as of inner landscape, are still being discovered and compounded. Each constrains the others so that, in Wagoner's hands, all are interesting and individual, if rarely spectacular. It is remarkable that the same man can publish those bookishly sardonic novels, The Road to Many a Wonder, Tracker, and Whole Hog, in straight Mark Twain picaresque concurrently with his luminous, entirely serious odes to the art of keeping one's head in woods or desert, passionate diatribes against the Weyerhauser lumber company, attractively reconstituted Indian lore, elegant personal lyrics of considerable depth. The same wit that generates pure farce in the novels opens, expands, illuminates, transfigures, consecrates, in the serious poems.

The clottedly heartfelt early poems he wrote about his home town east of Chicago were probably bidding for more sympathy than he needed or could use, the wrong kind for him. At any rate he dropped most of them from Collected Poems: 1956–1976, the better to declare his new birth. But the Chicago era left its mark in an odd, low-keyed impressionability to the reigning poetic fashions that dogged him well into the Sixties. When he began substituting stories, character, atmosphere, for formal qualities that no longer interested him, he found he could employ many romantic or quasi-surrealistic dilutions of plain sense without violating his level tone. They did, on the other hand, plainly violate his growing devotion to the laws of cause and effect. Innocent enough singly, they can annoy in bulk, like finding a Picasso reproduction in every house on Puget Sound. It was nevertheless a constant temptation, this ability to cool normally hot properties as it were with dry ice until they seemed submissive enough to work anywhere.

Is this not a familiar enough difficulty for countless contemporaries trying to work themselves into some assured new ethos or landscape of the mind? The opening lyric of the book Staying Alive dramatizes the problem in homely terms:

Wind, bird, and tree,
Water, grass, and light:
In half of what I write
Roughly or smoothly
Year by impatient year
The same six words recur.
I have as many floors
As meadows or rivers,
As much still air as wind
And as many cats in mind
As nests in the branches
To put an end to these.
Instead, I take what is:
The light beats on the stones,
The wind over water shines
Like long grass through the trees,
As I set loose, like birds
In a landscape, the old words.

The trouble comes in the second stanza. How did those Blakean cats get in there, and of what are they the supposed antithesis? Surely not of the trees, or if of the birds and their nests, what awkward gymnastics the poet is asking of us. Certainly the six nouns introduced in the first stanza are abstract enough, as all nouns must be. But those cats are abstractions of a different order from the floors or still air … disturbing. Here they just sit licking their paws, only apparently at home.

In Broken Country is another poised, tempered, inwardly harmonious fulfillment of Wagoner's exuberant love of action. What a good field officer, chief scout, hunter's guide, he would make! The accurate fall of accent, the sense of each word having been many times hefted, scoured, made part of the leanest possible baggage for the occasion; we are confronted with a no-nonsense poet whose distaste for pointless intimidation is as great as his desire to arm and forewarn. No living poet inspires more trust in the surviving power of language to render utility glamorous, prudence exciting, danger genuinely dreadful.

Do I come down too hard on this Daniel Boone-ish specialty of his, at the expense of the genre pieces that open the book? Schoolboy escapades and humiliations, father-and-son nostalgia, other agreeable jokes and domestic ruminations? Perhaps. Many people who think it necessary to thrill to Odysseus and the Argonauts will dismiss Wagoner's passionate outward-boundedness as an affair of schoolboys or misguided rubes. Too bad for them. For this reader the practiced charm of Wagoner's more “normal” poems lifts them no higher than the kind of jollification that precedes any trip into difficult terrain. They exist, and except for a few pungent bravura pieces like his long poem on Coxey's Army, have always existed as casual boundary markers for a mental landscape that is anything but casual or dependent on such folksy assurances.

The poems that justify the book and bring it, incrementally, to a satisfying conclusion begin on page 65 with “Cutting Down a Tree” and end on page 108 with the last line of “Getting There.” Some intervening titles tell the story: “Judging Logs,” “An Address to Weyerhauser, the Tree-Growing Company,” “Setting a Snare,” “Return to the River,” “Finding the Right Direction,” “Walking in Broken Country,” “Climbing Alone,” “Standing in the Middle of a Desert,” “Living Off the Land,” “Reading the Landscape.”

Are these not sufficiently momentous concerns for a poet of Wagoner's experience, even if we overlook the government's efforts to perpetuate their exercise in Alaska and other surviving wilderness tracts? This poet persuades us that they are. His zeal is made the more contagious by an absence of the self-caressing fanaticism of your run-of-the-mill wilderness nut.

These are not poems to be quoted piecemeal. Like the Indian sequences in earlier books they comprise a whole whose ultimate effect and flavor are indivisible. The great outdoors still offers ample occasion for other sorts of beauty. In Wagoner's verse, as in the prose of Thoreau or John Muir, we have the special beauty born of a love of action that expands in concert with its intellectual opportunities, that asks no less than it gives in the way of responsive action.

Notes

1. I use the word easternizer more figuratively than geographically. Though Roethke did come east, teach at Bennington, etc., his last years at Seattle and his last un-Yeatsian landscape poems did perhaps wipe away the stain of his earlier defection. Wright, on the other hand, “came east” in more ways than one.