John Ciardi

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John W. Hughes

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Like Sinyavsky, Ciardi has been deemed a subversive by certain mealy-mouthed inquisitors, but his true subversiveness eludes the wranglings of House committees. For Lives of X strips away the "old lies" to reveal the rag-and-bone shop that surrounded the youthful poet's growth to manhood:

                              As I was born—
    To dim red glows I sensed but could not read
    except to know there are Presences, and to learn
    the first of everything is a lunacy
    whose chatter starts before us in the dark.

The Orphic voice is subversive in that it breaks down the subject-object distinctions of the Cartesian mind, puts us in touch with the chattering lunacy (the curling sea that circled the rim of Achilles's shield) that precedes us in the dark. Ciardi follows Wordsworth and Frost in molding the blank verse to the flowing immediacy of his remembrances, and in so doing explodes some of the mind-forged manacles that shackle modern poetry. There is no modish trifling with chaos and madness here, none of the Cartesian gimmicks of the Symbolist élite. Ciardi, like Robert Lowell and Stanley Kunitz and a few others, has recovered the Romantic sense of existential subjectivity that lay buried under T. S. Eliot's strictures about the "objective correlative" and Ezra Pound's notion that the poem must present "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time …" Time in Lives of X is never a frozen instant, but becomes instead a vehicle for the existential encounter between poet and world. The moments of epiphany, Wordsworth's "spots of time," embody the crisp sensations of a Hemingway or Joyce short story:

                                  I took my drink
       at clammy soapstone round a drain of stinks
       and slid back into bed, my toes still curled
       from the cold lick of linoleum.

The central theme is the growth of the poet's consciousness through time, his eventual turning away from the "mad histories" of his Italian immigrant family. But the madness is set in a social context, a vicious Irish South Boston of tenements and bigoted priests, and the turning away is accompanied by a powerful outflow of sympathy for his earthy proletarian family. Unlike such trendy Poundian irrationalists as Michael McClure and Gregory Corso, Ciardi refuses to glorify (or simplify) insanity and regression—he establishes a profound dialectic between Id and Ego, lunacy and Orphic order. (p. 31)

Ciardi shows that [the I-Thou relation between poet and world] is "ahead of thought"—it is the ground of human feeling upon which a healthy rationality can be erected. All forms of primitivism (including the fascist variety) are, in fact, a kind of debased thought, a manipulative objectification of the living universe. All objects have "inscape," in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and every poet must "deal out that being indoors each one dwells." A Hopkinsian intensity is captured by Ciardi in "The Graph," probably his most successful poem to date, in which the erudite Italian-American youth is suddenly transformed into a World War II airman:

      By time and after, where the guessed-at dead
      curled in, unborn, and charred before they hit,
      or blew to gases when their tanks cooked off,
      or only passed forever through one cloud;
      we manned wired systems, and the diagrams
      wavered on blue mirages like decals
      washed off a sunken panel, whole but warped.

The jet-stream currents of Ciardi's imagery coalesce into an intense awareness of dehumanized brutality. The graph that totals up the number of enemy dead becomes a symbol of this "wired" brutality, the manipulative Cartesian cruelty of modern life. The symbol is at all points inseparable from the poet's experience; it is never imposed on that experience (what Erich Auerbach calls "figural symbolism"). After an apocalyptic air raid we are left with the poet writing "what I remember of the dead, / our duplicates and their own in the globing moon." This is an appropriate vision of the humanism that pervades Lives of X. (pp. 31-2)

John W. Hughes, in Saturday Review (© 1971 by Saturday Review, Inc.; reprinted with permission), May 22, 1971.

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