[FitzGerald's best early works, such as The Greater Apollo, "The Hidden Bole", "Essay on Memory", "Return", "Tide's Will", "Copernicus", and "The Face of the Waters",] are distinguished particularly by their unusual stylistic features. There is a curious mixture of rhetorical and meditative tones, of rhythmically smooth, almost lyrical, cadences, and lines in which the rhythm is abrupt, halting or awkward. The texture of the verse contains what appears to be a peculiarly uncompromising blend of discursive generalization and a dense, tangled undergrowth of metaphor and imagery that often turns out, on close inspection, to be operating in paradoxical ways. The poems appear to be offering meanings primarily of a philosophical nature, yet because of the dense texture of the verse these meanings constantly evade ready formulation.

Such poems can be easily distinguished from much of the other earlier work, where FitzGerald self-consciously explores a range of … stances—the poet as wanderer, lover, bohemian, outcast, knight-errant, spiritual adventurer. Similarly, although later narrative poems like "Heemskerck Shoals", "Fifth Day", Between Two Tides and "The Wind at Your Door" sometimes make use of philosophical generalization, they are not primarily speculative poems: the philosophical substance is less the subject of the poems than something given, a priori, in terms of which the poet can provide dramatic perspectives on a human, historical context. FitzGerald's more recent poetry has revealed yet another shift of direction. Looking at the surface of poems like "Eleven Compositions: Roadside" and "Insight: Six Versions" we might be tempted to draw general analogies with some of the earlier poetry: similar kinds of imagery, a "characteristic" combination of syntactical complexity and direct statement. Yet the differences are radical. FitzGerald's characteristic later form is meditative—reflection arising from a particular event, or object in a landscape—and the generalization is most commonly in the form of understatement. Poems like "Creak of the Crow" and "Wings above Wings" (from "Insight: Six Versions") are remarkable for the economy with which the poet announces an analogy and proceeds to explore it by means of a strict logical extension. In the earlier group of poems to which I have referred FitzGerald's characteristic method is one of disjunction. The poems operate in terms of polarities: tensions between argument and image, the deliberate juxtaposition of different kinds of imagery, the persistent use of alternative formulations and negative definitions as elements in the presentation of an argument. The continuing attraction of these earlier poems—even to those who are drawn to formulate objections—is partly attributable, I think, simply to a difficulty in describing accurately what they are. They force us to rethink many of the assumptions behind descriptions which we habitually use: "rhetoric", "concreteness", the distinction between "poetry" and "philosophy".

My contention … is that polarities of abstraction and particularity lie at the core of the philosophical speculations initiated in The Greater Apollo (and explored further, through a variety of contexts, in poems like "The Hidden Bole", "Essay on Memory" and "The Face of the Waters",) and that they can never be isolated or separated in dealing with the mode of the poetry. They are poems concerned with the kinds of description we can make of our experience of the world, and in the process they investigate the adequacy of purely metaphysical formulations and the possibility of some kind of "transcendent" reality beyond time, sense experience and consciousness. (pp. 288-89)

In [the] earlier poems,… FitzGerald works characterically through various kinds of juxtaposition. These include the presentation of governing thematic polarities, and, in the texture of the poetry, a characteristic use of paradox, negative definition …, and a densely-packed imagery whose elements operate in contradictory ways (one image often appearing to cancel out or qualify another), thus creating local microcosms of the larger polarities. The effect of these procedures is to throw the emphasis in the poems on to the processes of thought themselves rather than on to the thoughts isolated as elements in a logically developing philosophical disquisition. In other words, when speaking about FitzGerald's philosophy we have to make a clear distinction between argument that is an element in the poetry, and the argument of the poetry. If we think of FitzGerald's poetry simply as the expression of thought we miss the crucial poetic interest of the poems as instruments of thought, and find ourselves burdened with a sterile distinction between "the poetry" and "the philosophy". We have to think of the poems not so much as closed systems—the refined end-product of all kinds of activity, processes of selection and rejection, which have taken place prior to the poem itself—but as open-ended poems in which the poet creates the illusion that these processes are "actually" taking place in the poem. The seeking of definition is an integral part of the meaning offered by the poem as a whole. (p. 293)

The polarities that inform The Greater Apollo are fundamental elements in [A. N.] Whitehead's philosophy of organism. FitzGerald's poem juxtaposes notions of permanence and flux: time as undifferentiated process, a continuous evolutionary stream that flows independently of the mind, and time as a succession of experienced moments differentiated by consciousness as it becomes aware of instances of decay, loss and renewal. And it also juxtaposes notions of unit and multiplicity…. (p. 294)

[The] categorical assertions of the facts of sense experience which end the poem ("this is a bird; and that's pool") affirm the possibility … of the Greater Apollo, where any approach through purely metaphysical descriptions must fail. The three poems that follow the fourth poem of the sequence, by contrast with the three poems that precede it, all offer versions of permanence and unity which include, but go beyond, the perceptions of tree as tree and stone as stone. (p. 295)

The "Hidden Bole" and "Essay on Memory" are both further explorations of the polarities (flux and permanence, unit and multiplicity) of The Greater Apollo, and could be described as poetic meditations on Whiteheadian ideas. The argument of "The Hidden Bole" rests on a categorical assertion of the fact of the poet's experience of beauty in Pavlova's dancing. In the attempt to find some permanent base for that experience the poet questions the validity of idealist and purely metaphysical formulations as well as purely "psychological" explanations: beauty is not some transcendental Platonic entity existing beyond time and space, nor does it exist only in the mind of the perceiver; it is not an inherent property of the external world, nor is it a self-existent "aesthetic" entity…. The notion of a hidden principle working through what we experience as change, growth and decay is necessary to validate what we assert is a real experience. We cannot point to the hidden bole or know whether it is purposeful or not since it is the very ground of our experience of beauty; the moment we try to say something about it we abstract it from the experiential core to which it alone gives meaning, and become involved in the falsifying metaphysical categories previously rejected in the poem, projecting artificial permanences on to what can only be experienced in time. Pavlova's beauty is "rhymed into fact" by time and the poet. The achievement is aesthetic in the Whiteheadian sense: her individuality is defined by her relation to "piled other ages", past and to come; despite her death she remains a "stubborn fact" which in turn is context for other individualities, other experiences of beauty…. (pp. 298-99)

"Essay on Memory" takes up the notion of the Creative Advance, man's capacity for action within the continuing process of the universe. What is interesting in the treatment of memory is the way in which it dissolves, as an aspect of consciousness, into a sense of process itself…. The poem's stance, as in "The Hidden Bole", rests on the fact of present experience, but that present is constantly dissolving, in the imagery of the poem, into a sense of the past beating in on to the present, and of the present leaping forward into the future. The past (as memory) is the whole range of stubborn facts which provide the space-time environment of the present, which render the present as significant, individual experience. "We ourselves are Memory" in the sense in which these relationships with our past environment are part of the definition of what we are.

But how, within this apparently determining pattern, can we be said to be free to act? There is, I think, an existential validity in FitzGerald's assertions of the Creative Advance, of the authenticity gained in action, in the latter sections of "Essay on Memory", and it is related to the concept of actuality as process or "becomingness" in our experience of the world. The deliberate choice of action is an assertion of individuality …, without which we remain mere victims of the determining process; and such action will in turn define and create new futures. FitzGerald is bringing together, in the consecutive movements of the poem, polarities of determinism and free will…. (pp. 299-300)

"The Face of the Waters" is the most remarkable of FitzGerald's explorations of the themes informing The Greater Apollo, "The Hidden Bole" and "Essay on Memory", and perhaps embodies the most extensive poetic development of Whiteheadian concepts. The title, "The Face of the Waters", offers us, as symbol (like the Greater Apollo and the hidden bole), the unformulable concept around which and out of which the reality of our sense experience is asserted: the nothingness, impossible to conceive, out of which God created the perceptual universe of time and space. (p. 300)

The most startling features of the poem, on an initial reading, are its varieties of juxtaposition. There seems to be an extreme randomness in the choice of imagery, and the objects in the texture of the verse have a curiously disembodied quality…. There are sharp alternating juxtapositions of sheer "prose" discursive passages with the hard, disembodied objects; and there are numerous paradoxes in the discursive passages themselves—"the unformed shape", "the unexisting thought", "feet running fearfully out of nothing/at the core of nothing". The poem is, in fact, FitzGerald's most complex formulation of the polarities which constitute a metaphysic of the universe but which are broken down and "reconciled" in our actual experience of it: polarities of being and not-being; creation and nothingness; actuality and potentiality; becoming and perishing; instantaneousness and duration; the impossible placeless dot and extension in space; freedom and law; God and the non-existence of God. (p. 301)

The opening sections of "The Face of the Waters" gives us an imaginative description of creativity in terms of the myriads of possibilities which are excluded in any actual realization. They remain, from the perspective of our experience of actuality, in a state of not-being, but they are also potential for other occasions; they exist in the curious hinterland between utter nothingness … and actuality. The strange surrealistic quality of the "landscape" has been commented on; the disembodiment of the objects is remarkably appropriate to the conception. The swerving, sidling, skidding, scurrying, avoiding feet may be an imaginative projection of the Lucretian atomistic version of creation, described by Whitehead as "an interminable shower of atomic particles, streaming through space, swerving, intermingling, disentangling their paths". The twanged string of the harp and spring of the trap are extraordinarily powerful images of emergence from potentiality, the emergence of sound from silence presented in terms of the intermediate tension of the "twang" and "spring". And the hand of laughter suggests, again from the perspective of our experience of actuality, the arbitrariness of the abrupt realization of one from among the myriads of possibilities.

The fifth stanza is the crux of the poem, extending the exploration in terms of the mathematical concepts of a point and an instant…. In this stanza, formulations of eternity in terms of duration and extension are rejected and replaced by the non-extensional, non-durational definitions of point and instant—concepts which are necessary (in mathematics and physics) to an understanding of space-time phenomena, but which are nonentities in our actual experience in space and time…. The "eternity" guaranteed by the impossible "eternal instant" is the inexhaustible range of possibilities of which, as a nonentity, it is the ground. All these potentialities collapse, like the egg-shell, into nonentity, in the actual experiencing of an object or event, but they have missed that opportunity only to become potential for a multiplicity of other occasions.

However there are certain limitations to the apparently boundless range of possibilities. In the sixth section of the poem FitzGerald introduces "the modification of a dualism"; the enormous structure of forces and laws which provide "background for other coming and going". It would not be possible, for example, for a stone to appear suspended in space within the gravitational field of the earth. What FitzGerald seems to be saying … is that forces and laws (both in the scientific and socio-historical sense) are explanations of phenomena which point to and are themselves part of the evolving pattern of the universe. Ideas and thoughts bear the same relationship to actuality and potentiality as objects: they are unphysically alternative to nothing, and possess exactly the same inexhaustible potentiality.

Ultimately one comes back, in trying to explain the poetic power of "The Face of the Waters", to the extraordinarily vivid projection of intellectual processes …, as the mind moves round and grapples with the philosophical substance. The movement encompasses, at one extreme, the mystical symbolism of the Genesis creation myth and the Upanishadic myth of the cosmic egg whose fracturing produced the space-time universe, and at the other extreme, the scientific concepts of point, instant and vortex. Each provides a perspective on the governing polarity of nothingness and potentiality, out of which the poet asserts the inexhaustible energy of the universe. An experiential appeal informs the thinking of both FitzGerald and Whitehead, an assertion of the irreducible "stubborn facts" of immediate experience; yet the speculations that proceed from the stance are metaphysical, and ultimately … imply an idealist slant. Even when the individual unique objects and events of our experience have been merged into the constantly evolving process of the universe, and traditional idealisms carefully rejected, the possibility of a single unitary ground for this process remains an object of speculation inseparable from the way "actuality" itself is presented in the poems. (pp. 302-04)