["Functional Poetry: A Proposal"] establishes Dudek as the contemporary Canadian poet most consciously concerned with shape, form and sound: the origins of rhythm. He feels that the widening scope of prose rhythm has set up an impasse for poetry which he would like to break through…. His aim apparently is to invade the fortress where prose has taken hold and return it to the rightful owner, poetry…. (pp. 26-7)

Before he reached this eighteenth century critical position Dudek as man and poet went through many phases. His earliest poetry in East of the City is lyrical and imagist: concerned not with sound effects so much as with pictures in rhythmic arrangement. Already the clouds and the sea he is so fond of observing represent his objective correlative for the world of poetry: a world where recurrent rhythms subject to wind and weather, subject to sun and moon, are expressed through language…. In many of these short lyrical pieces the poet's "eye" is on the object but in the background is a subjective, emotional "I" responding to these objects…. Dudek's search for "straight language and relevance" is certainly to be found in these early poems. Nonetheless he is not wholly free from the metrical bonds of the past. (pp. 27-8)

Even twenty years ago … Dudek had made his stand known. He was opposed to "musicality" à la Keats. He wanted poetry to reveal itself naked, without the props and embellishments of sound. His best poetry is unified, of a piece, and not discursive as is prose….

Dudek's apparent philosophizing, his didacticism, are in reality a consideration of possibilities. His prose content, like his prose syntax, is a kind of disguise. (p. 30)

It would be a mistake to assume that [Dudek's] simple, straight-forward use of languages, which never falls into obscurantism or ellipsis and which is always syntactically complete, is necessarily the language of prose. Dudek's poems are rhythmic wholes…. Order and control are the keynotes to this poet's work: as in sculpture, the whole must be visible at a glance, but the detail must be exact, and highlighted where essential. Moreover, none of Dudek's poems can be accused of being too short or too long (for even his "epic" poems are a series of short apprehensions). Quite frequently the poems seem to lack drama and dramatic tension, but they are a true rhythmic mirror of the poet's intention. No word or phrase can be taken away; none can be added. There is, further, only the sparest use of adjectives; instead there is strong reliance on nouns, verbs, clauses. (p. 31)

[Proof] that Dudek is more concerned with musical articulation than with onomatopeia—music as "cry"—is to be found in the texture of his vocabulary. Although he maintains a harmony of vowel sounds there is apparently no effort towards alliteration, assonance or half-rhymes (except in a few of the latest lyrics in En Mexico). It is as if the poet had an instinct for the right sounds without consciously working to make them so. (p. 32)

Sound harmonies …, together with a beautifully balanced phrasal pattern, enhance the conceptual conclusion which is the theme of all Louis Dudek's poetry: that harmony and order in nature towards which mankind strives. All his recent poetry of the fifties and sixties, with the exception of the satirical pieces of Laughing Stalks, repeats the same theme…. As a sculptor takes a lump of clay and fashions it into varying shapes he retains the essential element that makes it a work of art: rhythm. So in his cool, grave, lucent poems does Louis Dudek create and magnify his world. (p. 35)