From the beginning of his poetic career, Donald Justice has focused obsessively on a central theme: loss….

But it is not Justice's themes that first strike the reader on coming to the Selected Poems. It is the language itself, the particular idiom and pattern of the poems. While some poetry aims directly at arousing the feelings, Justice's poetry appeals to the feelings through the route of the intelligence. Form is present in an emphatic way—we notice the poem's structure, the elegant musical language. (p. 44)

There is no attempt at realism in Justice's poetry; the action and language are structured, contrived. Justice has always been interested in working out a form that expresses and accompanies what he wants to say….

Influenced by Eliot's essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Justice early on worked within, from, and against his "received" tradition. He continues to do so. (p. 45)

Many of Justice's poems apply the principle of theme and variation….

Tension [in "Landscape with Little Figures"] achieves an elegant balance of force. On the one side, there is the theme of loss and the subject matter of a decaying landscape; on the other side, there is the texture of language and the title of the poem. The language is direct and child-like in its simple declarations…. A story is being told, distance is being created. The title of the poem, which sounds like the title of a painting, also creates distance. In a poem that deals with such an emotionally charged theme as loss, these elements give us a sense of equilibrium between the past and the present, history and experience, so that the objects and figures in this poem are alive yet living only in art, still with us but lost long ago.

Balance is also achieved by coupling parallel elements in the poem. In "Landscape with Little Figures," "form" shapes "content" by doubling, duplicating…. [The] repetition of words in the poem both mirror and are what Justice has to say about his theme of loss. For the poem is ultimately about moderation and compromise. One way of coming to terms with loss is to account for the thing lost; to observe and realize the inevitability of change is the first step towards acceptance. (p. 46)

Like his sestinas, Justice's "theme-and-variation" poems often have a subject which is identical to the structure…. "Absences" and "Presences" are also about adapting to change. The poems begin with a statement about loss and end with a statement about the recurrence of loss. Their structural order images human process as it moves through time; the poet's rhythm reveals his feeling about temporal relationship and movement. (pp. 46-7)

[In "Presences" we] notice, after several readings, some elements of order. There are thirteen words and phrases that repeat exactly or with a slight variation; several words repeat three times. Although unrhymed, a pattern of expectation is built through conspicuous repetition: the poem moves forward by pulling the ear forward. Finally, there is a temporal pivot at the center of the poem … providing a crucial prosodic and thematic balance….

"In the Attic" is about loss, childhood loss, and the variations of thought are captured in the repetition of eight end-words, each repeated once as the poem unfolds. Like the other poems, this one has an urgent gravity, an authentic resonance. (p. 47)

Formal pattern serves as a kind of obliquity. As [John Crowe] Ransom often noted in his essays, the fixed form proposes to guarantee the round-about of the artistic process and the aesthetic distance. But as we have seen, any form—fixed or free—does the same if carefully handled. Justice's reticence, his allegiance to aesthetic distance, is aligned to another of Eliot's propositions: "the emotion of art is impersonal." As balance can be achieved through a tug-of-war, Justice paradoxically finds that one way of fulfilling his "simple wish to be elsewhere" is to write a self-portrait. In "The Poet at Seven," Justice chooses two immediately apparent means of achieving psychological distance. The poem is in the sonnet form and the title proposes a temporal distance of more than (at the time the poem was written) twenty-five years. A new poem, "First Death," is a self-portrait at eight. The temporal distance is now more than forty-five years and the poem's formal distance—rhymed tetrameter couplets—allows the poet to speak openly about the loss of his grandmother.

In the 1960's, Justice's interest in form led him to write more free verse. Certainly Williams' poetry and theories about prosody—"break from the old arrangements of the word"—were an influence on him. Justice's new poems accepted the challenge of writing in free forms (variations by definition), while maintaining a sense of conscious organization. (pp. 48-9)

But if his prosodic decisions were related, in any part, to changing literary fashions, other decisions—psychological distance and manner of speaking—were not…. [In 1960] when the poetic fashion was to write with a tendency toward personal disclosure, Justice chose to continue with an aesthetic of impersonality. The best poems in Night Light are balanced by Justice's new freedom of form (radical) working with the old (conservative) aesthetic of the "impersonal emotion."

Justice continued to work toward a conscious effacement of self. The verse forms changed, but the rhetorical properties remained about the same. The poems are understated and often witty; while seemingly detached in attitude, they are engaged fully in the style of saying.

Justice did not begin writing more free verse to get closer to "common" speech. Understanding that the language of poetry is artificial by nature, he is skeptical of the poem's ability to duplicate real speech—a theory which some free-verse poems propose. The poetry in Night Light speaks, with increased syntactical variation, to the subjects the poet has been interested in all along. The voice has the same elegant timbre.

And the poetry exhibits a variety of discernible arrangements. Several poems are in traditional meters (including the witty "My Early Poems"); some are "loosely" metrical; others are ordered according to syllabic and strong-stress principles; two are prose-poems. The reader feels the poet performing with a great sense of confidence, clearing a path for himself between the radical and the conservative.

"To the Hawks" is typically graceful and orderly. Atypically, it is a political poem. Its theme is loss and the subject is the Vietnam war. The function of convention—the poem is syllabic—is immediately apparent: convention tempers the sentimental possibilities that the poet risks…. "To the Hawks"—with its humble voice and reliance on convention—is still able to move the reader. (pp. 49-50)

Justice's approach to creating aesthetic distance is linked, of course, to the poet's temperament…. His sensible emotional wariness can be defined as an attitude which is agnostic and stoic.

Justice applies this attitude to his central theme: the passing of time and the impermanence of self and the world. We find in the poetry that the flowers are "fading," the summer is "dying," the greenery "decaying;" photographs "turn yellow."… Characters in the poems are "aging," "weary," "exhausted," "tamed," "passive and ornamental."… Yet the objects and characters in these poems are "most beautiful in their erasures." In his third book, Justice further develops and explicitly defines a poetry which means to stand, as well as it might, in the way of decay and diminution.

The epigraph, used with variation, is a distinguishing characteristic of many of the later poems…. He borrows widely, performing variations on a poet's sense of line; he borrows themes, images, phrases, and prose sentences. There are acknowledgements to Guillevic, Stevens, Williams, John Peale Bishop, John D. MacDonald, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Lorca, Vallejo, Bergman, Rilke, Alberti, and others, a diverse group of precursors. (p. 51)

A comment on the title of the third collection, Departures, might help clarify what I see as Justice's intentions, and give us a better idea of how to read the poems. The poems are not, we know, translations; and they are not "imitations," a word which implies close study of an "original." These poems are departures: they "go away from" or "set out" from received matter or form. The influences are fluid and become, through the construction of the new poem, indirect. Because Justice has assimilated and digested what he has borrowed, the poems are original—if we do not take that word to mean "novelty." (p. 52)

[Mirrors] are an obsessive image in Justice's work. Mirrors and imaged variations of mirrors recur: sunglasses, storefronts, train windows, reflecting pools, and, more abstractly, all of art in the sense that "art mirrors life." (p. 55)

Any experience, for Justice, is aesthetic experience. His poems present the world as an object of experience, not as experience itself. In a new poem, "Childhood," Justice is speaking of the Olympia Theater, where he can "look up at a ceiling so theatrical / Its stars seem more aloof than the real stars." For the poet, the illusion of reality, an artful manmade star, is more magical than reality itself. Justice's metaphoric mirrors serve both to reflect and absorb presences. The stars on the ceiling reflect the stars in the sky; but as objects of art, they also mirror, by having absorbed, the personality of the artist-maker.

Memory, too, has the ability to absorb and hold "hidden from us" those objects and experiences that have sunk deeply into it…. It is the poet's duty to retrieve from memory those things that deserve to be saved. The poet passes through the mirror and returns to write the poem. The poem, in turn, is the record of a successful journey….

["Fragment: To a Mirror"] is composed entirely of questions. Justice's philosophy—or rather his way of making a philosophical inquiry—is explicit here. Death and life are equal halves of "nothingness"; the "promised absence" is the equal portion of the poet's given presence; and memory—the poem is filled with images from his childhood in the South—is the other half of imagination. It is in this manner that Justice's inquiry, his meditation on time's passing, conducts itself: abstract questions of imagination are answered, as well as they might be, with specific images from memory. (pp. 55-6)

In "Things," he calls his mirrored reflection "My still to be escaped from." In "Poem," Justice speaks about the effacement of self and the construction of the poem which must represent the poet in his physical absence. The attitude is clearly agnostic and stoic: "You have begun to vanish. / And it does not matter. / The poem will go on without you." (pp. 56-7)

In "Variations on a Text by Vallejo," Justice assumes the responsibility for writing that hardest elegy of all: an elegy for the self. Characteristically, he is able to speak most openly when creating a distance between himself and his chosen subject. The poem begins, as does Vallejo's poem, "Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca," with a premonition: "I will die in Miami in the sun, / On a day when the sun is very bright, / A day like the days I remember, a day like other days." Justice's departure from Vallejo's text is largely in terms of expansion; the poem qualifies and explains with added and altered descriptive details. Emotionally, the poem "feels" about the same as Vallejo's—intense and personally daring. But by making personal the details and style, the poem becomes distinctly, if not exclusively, Justice's. The final stanza begins with the boldness of a newspaper headline: "Donald Justice is dead." The stanza goes on to elaborate and pull together the elements and images of the first two stanzas. The variations play themselves out; the poem proves the premonition true. (p. 57)

Thomas Swiss, "The Principle of Apprenticeship: Donald Justice's Poetry," in Modern Poetry Studies (copyright 1980, by Media Study, Inc.), Vol. X, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 44-58.