[In the following excerpt, Morris provides a negative assessment of Poems, 1957-1967, calling the poems in the volume dull, awkward, and stylistically inferior.]

James Dickey, Jean Garrigue, and Louis Simpson are ready apparently for an assessment of their work to date; for each poet, the current book is a selection from all his past work plus a final section containing new poems.

Traditionally we have expected poets to develop their powers of observation, to give form to their utterance; to be concise and precise, to seek a verbal music, and to enrich the texture of their verse with the devices of rhetoric. In Mr. Dickey's verse [in Poems, 1957-1967] I find the observation myopic, sometimes filmed completely over; form is adhered to but so meaninglessly or inexactly as to suggest casual concern only or incredibly inept management. In addition to what seems a total inability to achieve conciseness within a single poem, Mr. Dickey appears unable also to conclude a poem in under thirty lines. Of the 108 pieces in this volume, only seven comprise fewer than thirty lines. The majority of the poems are close to fifty lines or over. Precision in diction is of so little concern to the poet that in many cases even prepositions are employed awkwardly or improperly. With the two foregoing misdeeds, music can be at best only a tiresome jangle, harsh and out of tune. Rhetoric in our fashionable age is out at heels and many will applaud Mr. Dickey's avoidance of all the old devices, but will they clap also for the resulting threadbare fabric of the verse?

Mr. Dickey is a poet of nature; he looks at a wide range of wildlife; shark, fox, wolverine, deer, cattle, big cat at the zoo, rabbit, sheep, dog, and mostly unidentified birds. But I wish to test Mr. Dickey's observation of snakes, reptiles being among the few creatures I know anything about.

“Reincarnation (I)” presents a former county judge reborn as a rattlesnake. Mr. Dickey does not know that the rattlesnake, like all pit vipers, is viviparous, not oviparous.

… disappearing into the egg buried under the sand
And wakened to the low world being born …

Mr. Dickey has heard that snakes employ their tongues in sensory perception, in some manner other than to taste. The scientists, much at odds about the matter, say that snakes smell through their tongues or feel through them or do indeed, like other creatures, taste through them. None that I have ever heard or read has suggested that snakes hear through their tongues:

With his tongue he can hear them in their concerted effort. …

Mr. Dickey believes that snakes can pass through the grass without a telltale wavering of blades.

                              he moves through, moving nothing,
And the grass stands as never entered.

Such skill is rarely, if ever, true of the rattlesnake. Add to this recital his error in believing that rattlesnakes rattle as a warning and that they will attack a man unprovoked.

Perhaps more a failure in logic or in preciseness than in observation is the age of Mr. Dickey's snake. Observation would come into play, however, in a person's having noted that a new-born rattlesnake is rarely twelve inches long, whereas the snake in the poem would have to be several feet:

Still, passed through the spokes of an old wheel, on and
around
The hub's furry rust in the weeds and shadows of the riverbank.

Logic fails the writer when he presents us with a mature snake, one who has already “drawn from bird eggs and thunderstruck rodents”, and yet tells us that the reincarnated judge is in the “new/Life of resurrection”. Would not reincarnation be as a new-born creature rather than as something already existing, already full-grown?

I know very little about other animals of which Mr. Dickey writes, but when he makes six errors of considerable magnitude on a creature I know something about, I am reluctant to accept his teachings on others.

I have condemned the writer's casual nod to the conventions of form. In his earlier work, most of his pieces may be said to be stanzaic: pattern is observed in the number of lines to the stanza. Favored stanza lengths are five and six lines per unit, although couplets, tercets, quatrains, septenaries, and octets are frequently used. But why Mr. Dickey has observed such regularity in this one matter is beyond me. Since he employs no rhyme pattern, it is not rhyme that determines the length of a stanza. Since stanza units are not thought units, image units, or sound units, these factors do not dictate the length of a stanza. In fact, there is no justification for any of his groupings. Line length, at first glance, appears regular; but on scanning we find that Mr. Dickey ignores the number of feet in any given line whenever he pleases.

In his later work, Mr. Dickey is apparently experimenting with very long lines, broken on the printed page by extra spacing to indicate pauses or rhythm groupings. He is not attempting an alliterative revival as some reviewers have suggested, for no convention of Anglo-Saxon or Middle English verse with which we are familiar is observed. I suppose he is writing by phrases—wanting cadences that to him must be attractive—but to get cadences he employs a good many loose constructions, a weakness that leads to my next objection.

Mr. Dickey writes verse so loosely that he may do anything in it, commit any dispersal, admit any discourse, follow any digression. In “The Escape”, the title of which refers to arranging burial in a plot other than the family mausoleum in Fairmount, Mr. Dickey employs twenty-one lines to describe some of the surroundings the corpse will “escape”. Mr. Dickey or the “over-witty in other mens Writings” will justify these excursions as scenes of life and death not to be encountered in the county graveyard in Alabama to which the corpse escapes; even as such the tableaux are loosely written, with much unnecessary verbiage. But they do not belong in the poem at all; a finer poet would achieve a greater poignancy through symbolic correlatives, delivered in the focused materials themselves.

Illustrations of Mr. Dickey's lack of verbal precision may be taken from almost any poem (my italics):

Bleary with ointments

(“Sun”)

With a ring of convulsive rubber

(“Adultery”)

With dew our porous home
Is dense, wound up like a spring,
Which is solid as motherlode
At night.

(“Hedge Life”)

Especially are his pronouns difficult. As in the last quotation above, where the antecedent for the relative pronoun which is impossibly ambiguous, poem after poem employs all the different classes of pronouns—personal, possessive, demonstrative, and relative—in bewildering uncertainty; see for instance “The Wedding”. So often is dedicated search a necessary labor that a reader wearies and concludes the pains have outcost the truffles. Especially distatsteful is the repeated use of you as an indefinite pronoun.

And, finally, Mr. Dickey's avoidance of all but a few of the devices of rhetoric, his eschewal of most of those things which would give density to his verse—and herein most especially symbolic action—leave his work so thin that a reader is left unsatisfied, and one who endures the full three hundred pages of Poems 1957-1967 suffers a dulling tedium through which poetry should never put its faithful.

Unfortunately I find little or no growth in this collection of the work of ten years; the only change is in the direction of greater dispersal, to be found both in the author's self-permissiveness in greater rambling and in his adoption of the long line. And although no single poem satisfies altogether, here are the pieces that are least discomforting: “The Performance”, “The Lifeguard”, “Chenille”, “Cherrylog Road”, “Pursuit from Under”, “Gamecock”, “Mangham”, “Angina”, “The Sheep Child”, and “Bread”.