[Zukofsky is] the classic eiron described in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: self-deprecating, seldom vulnerable, artful, given to understatement, modest or mock-modest, indirect, objective, dispassionate, unassertive, sophisticated, and maybe foreign…. (p. 8)

For whatever reason (and reasons are legion), the eiron's art—irony—amounts to saying two or more things at one time, so that an auditor with 20/20 ears ought to hear an ironic utterance as a chord of sorts, one that displays its own meaning in its own sound as harmonies among cord and chord, accord and a chord, even choral and coral. (p. 10)

What the solo modern prose voice at the beginning of "A" accomplishes is … to suggest both irony and fugue complexly: by talking about a piece of vocal-instrumental polyphony and by doing so in ways that are themselves fugal or quasi-fugal:

            A
                 Round of fiddles playing Bach.

"A" equals air (aria) with different values in ancient and modern English, or in English and other European languages, or in English itself variable according to stress. Prefixed in this way or that, it means "with" and it means "without." It means "one" and "he" and "they" and "of." Here, right off the baton, it plays "around" against "a round," which is iridescent with musical, poetic, geometric, and mundane meanings. The part-for-whole figure of "fiddles" (for "fiddlers") plays against the whole-for-part figure of "Bach" (for "a work by Bach"), and "playing," as I have been leaking none too subtly, means everything that both "work" and "play" can mean, including the ideas of performance and impersonation and contest. (p. 11)

[An] etymological history of three words converging in a single sound—rote—may be seen as a model of Zukofsky's main themes and techniques in "A." No modern ironic poem of any length could possibly be self-standing, and Zukofsky's resembles those by Williams, Pound, and Eliot in including precursors and companions. (p. 12)

Zukofsky begins his poem on a particular April evening in 1928, and for him—as for Whitman, Yeats, and Eliot before him—this paschal time of Passover and Passion, converging in the syncretism of Eos-East-Easter with its terrible beauty, furnishes an ideal prism for seeing the world clearly and for intelligently hearing its ironies and harmonies…. Given this matrix of ideal convergences, the eiron's eyes and ears can subject language to a detailed inquisition, though it hardly takes the full third degree to remove hide and hair from verbal surfaces. In a sixty-year career, Zukofsky experimented with every species of rhematic and thematic irony as ways of saying more than one thing at a time, and he devoted an inordinate amount of his genius to the transfiguration into English of various foreign texts. Since Zukofsky tried to preserve sound and sense alike—which is impossible—"translation" is not quite the correct word for this process…. Zukofsky's refinement, which may echo certain Talmudic or Cabalistic techniques of interpretation, has been to apply this principle of nomenclature to whole texts, typically ironic or comic-lyric, and to produce a complete Catullus by this method, as well as a version (appearing as "A"-21) of Plautus' Rudens, which is evidently a reworking of a lost Greek play by Diphilus. (pp. 13-14)

Zukofsky's novel handling of Latin and other foreign languages has been duly admired by some, but I have to say that I think his Catullus and Plautus are dull distortions. Their purpose may be to breathe (literally) new breath through their consonants and vowels, but the result is a high-handed botch.

I am not qualified to discuss the fine points of this complicated problem of translation. It's just that sound and sense cannot be transferred from one language to another, and it may also be true that not even sense by itself can be moved. (p. 14)

Kept up doggedly for seventy pages, Zukofsky's Plautus' Diphilus' Rudens is the most tiresome part of "A."

The next most tiresome part is "A"-24, which is another fugal experiment. "A"-21 amounts to a superposed transmogrification of the folk theme of the recovered daughter with Greco-Roman voices joined by synthetic English…. "A"-24, which was composed by Celia Zukofsky (with help from the Zukofsky's brilliant son, Paul) … is not so much the real conclusion of "A" as a kind of addendum called L. Z. Masque, "a five-part score—music, thought, drama, story, poem." The score is presented contrapuntally with music in two staves (treble and bass) above four verbal lines in type of varying sizes. The music is Handel's, the words from Zukofsky's Prepositions (thought), Arise, Arise (drama), It was (story), and "A" itself (poem)…. I have taken some pains to describe "A"-24, because I don't want to be judged indifferent or careless when I say that the thing is unreadable. I have done my best, line-by-line and also measure-by-measure, and in my cranial studio I get only the effect of five non-profit educational stations going at one time. I'll keep at it, but for the present I can't find anything to admire. In both "A"-21 and "A"-24 the fugue fails [and subtracts from the overall integrity and intensity of "A"]. (pp. 15-16)

The remaining twenty-two sections add up to about five hundred pages of poetry that takes the initial fugal subjects and styles through a forty-five-year development, conditioned by external historical and personal events but never, I think, completely irrelevant to the promises potently implicit in

             A
                 Round of fiddles playing Bach.

Earlier I suggested a number of the possible meanings, but I did not mention the chance that the fiddles are playing B A C H, which, in a peculiar German style of notation used at one time before the seven-note nomenclature was adopted, would sound as B-flat, A, C, B-natural…. Zukofsky's use of this musical acrostic to organize the very long (135 pages) "A"-12—

                   Blest
                   Ardent
                   Celia
                            unhurt and
                  Happy—

brings us back to the alphabet and its gifts and challenges to the ironic poet. (pp. 16-17)

[A] work of art inherently resists being used for autobiography or any other kind of direct representation. Only by certain tricks can an artist register his own presence in a self willed medium, especially if he is an eiron approaching that medium and its social environment from below or outside. The eiron's infra-structural position resembles the alien's extra-structural condition, so that if one has to be both—a talented son, say, of Yiddish-speaking immigrants—then one's ears will, with luck, be attuned to speech as a foreign entity and, particularly, to American English as the native property of others…. Poetry tests the language as language tests the world.

An ironic epic, accordingly, is going to be partly an ordeal for words themselves, starting, conventionally enough, with the virtually pure air of the first letter and first vowel, a. The purpose of the ordeal, from the viewpoint of ironic skepticism, will be to follow the contours of language without undue distortion, so that most of Zukofsky's prosody is a natural-seeming measure of syllables-per-line or words-per-line with no twisting, chipping, or padding to fit an imposed meter that may depend on an arbitrary Morse of qualitative or quantitative dots and dashes given further shape by a rhyme scheme. Once the measure by syllable unit or word-unit is established along with a modest devotion to short lines, however, the purest music of consonant and vowel, stress and pitch, fancy and plain can come through with an effect, usually, of delicacy, eloquence, accuracy, and fidelity.

Such an idiom works best with its inherent data of ambiguity, inquisition, and multiple irony. These data are most lucidly presented in fairly short poems (like Zukofsky's, and like those of Cid Corman and Robert Creeley, both of whom owe much to Zukofsky's example) in which the courtesy and modesty can balance the potentially injurious clarity of perception and memory. The idiom does not work so well in longer flights, in which it tends to become otiose or academic. ("A" comes equipped with an index, but it quirkily omits some important items…). Yet another difficulty with this idiom is the way it refreshingly insists on seeing everything anew, with unprejudiced eyes; but that means the propagandist for the idiom, whether in lyric or in critical writing, had better be sure he is original. Often, however, Zukofsky seems merely derivative. His A Test of Poetry, for instance, promises to chuck out academic biases but winds up as little more than a replay of Pound's "How to Read" and A B C of Reading…. I am not sure that originality is very important. I am not even sure it is quite possible. But if you make a fuss about it, then you ought to be able to do some other thing than imitate, echo, and repeat.

At his best, Zukofsky dissolves illusion and punches sham to pieces. He breaks things up into particles and articles: under his testing, for example, the ambiguity-loaded anathema is analyzed into "an, a, the—"…. Once the alphabet has been taken apart, though, the problem is how to put it back together with honest energies and designs. (pp. 18-20)

As "A"-24 is arranged, the whole book ends on a nicely cadenced C-minor chord in the harpsichord, the drama voice saying, "New gloves, mother?" and the poem voice repeating the end of "A"-20, "What is it, I wonder, that makes thee so loved." Finally, with "love" sounding simultaneously in "gloves" and "loved," a valentine, indeed.

Well, I must be churlish. I prefer consigning "A"-24 to the status of appendix or addendum, because I think the poem itself (if not the life of the poet) finds a more authentic and convincing conclusion in the end of "A"-23, which was the last part written by Zukofsky. It does not end, Heldenleben-style, with a survey and synthesis of the artist's life-in-work, but with a return to the alphabetical keynote that started "A"-1. What we have is a scrupulously measured twenty-six-line alphabet-stretto…. (p. 20)

In "A"-12 there is evidence that Zukofsky had the twenty-four-book plan in mind by 1950 and possibly somewhat earlier…. But Zukofsky's general design does not gracefully fall into twenty-four shapely parts. With or without the marginal "A"-21 (Rudens) and "A"-24 (L. Z. Masque), the shape of the whole is asymmetrical. The contour may match that of a diary or revery, but there is no essential literary progression. Such development as may emerge is more along the lines of an experimental fugue and variations, with room along the way for one poem 135 pages long ("A"-12) and another four words long ("A"-16)…. When the "plot" has to include a piece of history—such as the death of Williams or the assassination of President Kennedy—then the writing slackens, and the grief seems perfunctory. In other stretches, the author's vigor and sincerity seem to thin out and his word play ("Pith or gore has" for "Pythagoras") nose dives towards the asymptote of crossword puzzles and tricks….

The scholiasts have their work cut out for them. For all I know, the audience for poems like Zukofsky's may be nothing but scholiasts…. [Maybe] the publisher should … issue a 250-page volume of selections. I would suggest that 1-7, 9-11, 15-18, and 20 could be kept as wholes, 21 and 24 done without, and the rest given in generous selections. That sort of book would reach more people with a more concentrated representation of a fine poet's best work. (pp. 21-3)

William Harmon, "Eiron 'Eyes'," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review (copyright © Poetry in Review Foundation), Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1979, pp. 5-23.