September, 1976, marked the publication of the Collected Poems of an American poet who at seventy-six has written quietly over the past half-century a body of poems which deserves to be celebrated. The poet is Robert Francis. His career was long characterized by a lack of recognition—Robert Frost called him America's "best neglected poet"—and even after the publication of The Orb Weaver by Wesleyan in 1960 and Come Out Into the Sun by the University of Massachusetts in 1968 helped change this situation to some degree, his work has continued to be omitted from most of the anthologies which have tried to represent the best contemporary American poetry. It seems to me that any sampling of "the best" of our poetry that doesn't include Francis is incomplete. (pp. 1-2)

In the experimentation and vital restlessness of the American poetry of the past twenty years or so, certain basic poetic values—e.g., music, clarity of statement, the calm light of a reflective mind, a polished surface—have often been overshadowed or shunted aside. Not without a certain growing interest of his own in more open variations of form, Francis throughout his career has been calmly stubborn in his devotion to a kind of poem that exists in the currents of literary experiment and opinion like a smooth, deeply imbedded stone in a stream: the short, clear, meditative, lyrical poem. Francis has followed no poetic movements but those of his own imagination, and he has become a master of this kind of poem. (pp. 2-3)

Reading through Francis's poetry, one of the most strongly pervasive qualities one notices is the clarity, the subtle lustre, of the language. The poems have certainly been polished, but toward a greater transparence and directness rather than glittering effects. The language is fresh, exact, attractive, but it rarely stops the reader in his tracks, not for over-cleverness, nor obscurity, not even a sudden stab of power…. Francis's diction is lucid. He almost never sacrifices the movement or clarity of a poem for complicated phrases or images. (pp. 3-4)

["Poppycock"] is a celebration of the delicious eccentricity of words, and concludes with these lines:

              But to get back to poppycock
              what a word!
              God, what a word!
              Just the word!
 
              Keep your damn poems
              only give me the words
              they are made of.
              Poppycock!

The poem is not a very good one—Francis has a playfulness that sometimes turns cute, and then soft spots appear—but those closing lines express an important clement in his poetry: his relish for language, the weight of it on the tongue, the texture of it in the mind. While his love of words themselves at times leads him into preciousness and ornament, more often it helps him to become a namer: one of those poets—such as Whitman could be, enumerating the objects of the world, the "dumb, beautiful ministers"—whose noticing and mentioning of a thing captures the resonance a poem needs, whose naming is an act of creation and love. (p. 4)

If there is poetry that celebrates words, and poetry that tries to make words disappear, then Francis has written poems that could be assigned to one category or the other, but in most of his poetry he accomplishes the paradox of language which seems to move in both directions at once, to a degree not many modern poets have been able to sustain. Almost always there is in Francis's poetry the savor of the balance between memorable language and a relaxed lucidity.

There is a quality of crispness in Francis's work. Partly it derives from his clear eye, his closely observed imagery. His use of imagery is steady and sure, never bizarre or spectacular. An inward man by nature and lifestyle, when Francis writes of inward things he carries the solidity and delicacy of the things of the world with him.

The cripsness comes also from Francis's ear. Compared to most recent poetry, Francis's work is unfashionably musical. (pp. 5-6)

Early and late, Francis has been a lyrical poet. Many of his poems have the small, sharp music of epigrams and couplets, but his poetry also has more flowing rhythms and the more beautiful and haunting music of older repetitions—alliteration, assonance, refrain—and often they are quietly chant-like….

And there is the clarity of his intelligence. There is a wonderful crispness in Francis's thinking in his poems—the sense of a mind that has been given a long time to work, for the ideas to grow slowly, like crystals.

Many of Francis's poems are poems of direct, rational statement. This sort of poem seems especially prone to becoming stiff and unmysterious. Yvor Winters is the outstanding example of a poet whose dedication to reason gave his poems a grave, graven quality. But this kind of thinking in poems of course has a beauty of its own. Francis's grasp is firm and sure, but there is nothing stiff or didactic in its strength and precision. (p. 6)

[In the poem "The Orb Weaver," for instance, the] mind proceeds deliberately from observation, to reflection, to a plainly stated abstract conclusion growing out of the observation, creating a luminous, troubling arc. The poem is rational statement tinged with darkness—the darkness of the black spider, of the grasshopper wrapped and silent, of the mind caught in its quarrel, as in a web, with that dark thriving.

Francis is frequently a poet of wit, both in the modern and the Seventeenth Century sense of the word. It leads him sometimes to light verse—some of it, the recent poem "History" for example, very keen, some of it merely light. (p. 8)

Happily Francis's Collected Poems is already incomplete: he continues to produce excellent work. In 1976 he published a collection called A Certain Distance, which includes previously published poems but is primarily made up of prose poems—"portraits and sketches … done in words" Francis calls them—collected for the first time. The pieces in the book are contemplations and celebrations of young men. As Francis moves to the looser form of the prose poem, he retains the poise and perception of his poems written in verse. (p. 9)

Francis has no ideology or personal mythology, but his work has a great pervasive theme. This is one of the major themes of modern poetry especially, the theme of Williams and Stevens, of Richard Wilbur and Gary Snyder, in their different ways: the engagement of the imagination and the actual, poetry's effort to focus the material world in a new light and make us more awake to it. Francis's poems are mostly about things, observations, actions, seasons…. His poems only occasionally discuss this theme; continually, they embody it. He uses the things of the world for symbolic and moral purposes, but this is simply a part of the interplay of mind and subject, of the homage to awareness and the world. Since there is no heaven, we had better pay attention to the earth. (pp. 9-10)

In the poem "Statement," Francis avows his devotion to earthly rather than any ideal beauty, and says "I want a beauty I must dig for…. / I am in love with what resists my loving, / With what I have to labor to make live." This supports what I've said above, but it also brings to mind one of the limitations of Francis's poetry. The things that he writes about are commonplace and plain enough, but they are not things which require the greatest labor to love and make live. Imaginative renderings and meditations on juniper bushes and baseball players are welcome, but Francis stops about there in pursuing the lowly and the ordinary. One of the fine things about Williams is his insistence on including the ugly and forsaken in his poetic vision, which Francis does not do. He is a bit too decorous to do so.

Another theme which Francis has written on often is death, and he has done many beautiful poems on the subject. Reading such poems as "The Quiet Thing," "Past Tense," and "When I Come," one notices especially their calm, their clear-headedness and restraint. This is an admirable quality in elegiac poems, but it is part of another, related limitation, that of emotional intensity and range. Francis is not a poet of the depths and heights of emotion. His poems, whether acknowledgements of evil or expressions of joy, have an air of controlled grace. There is little if any terror or despair or exaltation in them. They lack the kind of power strong grief can give. (pp. 10-11)

Some of Francis's poems are aimed primarily at the ear, some at the eye; some are satiric, some are straightforward celebrations; some are discursive, some are "silent." Central to his work, however, is that it brings music and image, a steady light of the mind and things simple and mysterious, together into a union, a wholeness. Francis provides a valuable counterpoint to the solipsism of much of our poetry now….

[There is a] kind of beauty in poets who write short, lyrical, haunting, moving, clear, clarifying poems all their lives. In such poems there is a union of sense and sound, thought and feeling, that implies a union and condition of aliveness that might exist in human beings as well. This is the work this poet has done for us. (p. 11)