Hollander has written his Reflections on Espionage in the form of a single long poem composed in strict eleven-syllable lines, except for twenty-one lines at the very end which contain a clever cipher carefully explicated in the author's notes. Hendecasyllabic verse, then, is the "eleven-phase transposition grid" used by the secret agent Cupcake for transmitting in cipher his messages to other agents and ultimately to his director, named Lyrebird. All this of course is derived from the recent flurry of revelations about espionage and counterespionage in the Second World War, as represented in Sir John Masterman's The Double-Cross System (1972), which reveals such code-names for agents as Biscuit, Dragonfly, Cobweb, Zigzag, Tricycle, Garbo, Lipstick, The Snark, and so on. Hollander takes off from here with a galaxy of names that would delight any counterspy: Thumbtack, Image, The Foot, Aspirin, Steampump, Artifact, Gland, Felucca…. It will already be evident from some of these names that the "transmissions" are concerned with poetry as a mode of enciphered communication, where enigmatic messages come from agents beyond the individual mind, while the mind attempts to "encode" them and transmit them to other agents—Reader, no doubt, being the ultimate receiver. Allusions to poetry, poetic inspiration, and poets become increasingly overt as the work proceeds…. It does not take much of a "grid" to decipher Kilo as Pound, or Puritan as Eliot…. I suppose the section on Moroz alludes to Robert Frost; and there is certainly a candid appraisal of Anne Sexton ("So widely thought—and who believed herself—to / Be an agent"). Other names will no doubt be decoded; but the important thing about them is that, as in Alexander Pope, these figures, while sometimes recognizable, are larger than life, types, images of the varied manifestation of poetical effort, failure, and achievement.

It is in the transmissions to Image that the discussions of poetry become most intimate and profound, for Image is the agent's other self, his deeper self, the real self that lives within the "cover."… [His] mingling of the cadences of both Eliot and Stevens is a measure of the way in which Hollander has absorbed the codes of other poets and made them his own. Yet of all the echoing we hear, the most persistent is that of Stevens's Esthétique du Mal, and Hollander's achievement here is worthy of that grand comparison.

Perhaps all this sounds a little coy in brief review, but it is not so in the reading. This is not just another "poem about poetry." No good poem ever is, in any limited sense of the word poetry. Like Stevens, when Hollander speaks of, or implies, poetry, he includes within that word the whole human power of imaginative creation, imaginative living, imaginative seeking. That is why he spends a section pondering with Image the meaning of the root of the word "spy," placing in each of the twenty-one lines here "some trace of the Indo-European root," as he points out in a note. (pp. 118-20)

The basic power of Hollander's conception here lies in the way in which he has maintained the literal details of his fable: the "Terminations" of failed agents, the tortures, the deceptions, the sordid traps, the fears, the suspicions, the frustrations of a world in which "Scattered outbreaks of terror do not abate," while he transmutes the details into a parable of the efforts of a creative seeker, a tragicomic saga of the human effort to explore the workings of ultimate truth, to probe the depths of one's own consciousness, and to discover the springs of human motive in others. The effort, we learn, can only hope to succeed through stout mental discipline (symbolized by the eleven-syllable grid)…. And with discipline comes the hoped-for liberation: one must admire the flexibility and ease with which Hollander moves within his chosen grid; there is no sense of straining; the language, though frequently colloquial, moves with dignity and grace toward a measured eloquence…. With such a book, if we had not known his stature before, John Hollander surely stands forth as one of the two or three best in his generation of American poets now in their forties or early fifties. Indeed, I would say one of two.

In Hollander's poem one feels an acceptance of and reconciliation with a world of pain and struggle and terror—an attitude far removed from the outrage and fierce dissidence that invaded some of the poetry of the 1960's. By acceptance I do not mean resignation or indifference, but rather an attitude irradiated by the indestructible presence of hope: "the pleasures of hope," Hollander calls them, a kind of toughened hope that knows and sees and does not bow to Them. (pp. 121-22)