Foreword
Few people, on retiring from a position [such as editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets] can resist offering advice to their successors, who probably do not want it and will not heed it. Accordingly, I shall pass on to mine, for his imaginary benefit, a description of my procedure upon receiving in the spring a heavy parcel of manuscripts by names unknown to me.
The first time I go through them, I try to exclude from my mind any such considerations as originality, style, taste, or even sense, while I look for one thing only, lines of poetry. By this I mean a line which speaks itself, which, as it were, no longer needs its author's help to exist.
Thus, in my first reading of Mr. Dickey, I came upon lines like
Spinning and smiling as the world diminished
.....
That showed him whole, when we had gone away
.....
Their husbands carve the dressing and the bird,
The day, the napkin, and the carving plate
To bits that are too little to be heard.
whereupon he went onto the pile of potential winners. It is possible to show evidence of great intelligence and sensibility but to be lacking in the first power essential to poetry, the power to speak. Mr. Dickey's lines have both…. Again I read through them, looking for only one thing, the power to notice, the possession of what one might call uncommon common sense. This may appear either as an accurate and vivid description of some creature or object which we have all seen or as a truthful and illuminating comment upon some experience with which we are all familiar. For example, everyone carries some scar or other upon his body, but it is Mr. Dickey and not everyone who makes this observation:
Like hasty marks on an explorer's chart:
This white stream bed, this blue lake on my knee
Are an angry doctor at midnight, or a girl
Looking at the blood and trying not to see
What we both have seen. Most of my body lives,
But the scars are dead like the grooving of a frown,
Cannot be changed, and ceaselessly record
How much of me is already written down.
The capacity to notice is not, like the power to speak, essential to all poetry—there are beautiful lyrics in which it plays no part at all—but I value it very highly in this age as a moral virtue. (pp. viii-ix)
Having satisfied myself that the author of a manuscript can make words speak and is interested in something more than his precious little self, I now read it poem by poem, looking to see if he has learned to write a whole poem and has written enough of them to be ready to publish a book. How many is enough? Remembering that, when reading a volume by the greatest and most famous names, one almost always says of some of the poems "Why did he include that?" but that one never says this about a volume of one's own, I regard a manuscript as meriting publication if I like a third of its contents.
Like any work of art, a successful poem is a complete world with which, though it is a thing, the reader can make personal contact. But poetry is peculiar in that it is made of words; the medium of this art is the same as that of guidebooks, treatises on plumbing, business correspondence, and the Congressional Record. A poem therefore is, necessarily, what a painting need not be and a piece of music cannot be, a double world of things (words) and meanings. "Pure" poetry, poetry, that is to say, in which word and meaning are identical, is an impossibility; even a lyric like "Full Fathom Five" is "representational." Further, since the meaning of words depends upon common social agreement, poetry is the most "traditional" of all the arts. No poet can invent a language of his own; even the puns in Finnegans Wake presuppose an unchanging traditional language. Assuming that he had learned to speak French, the shade of Homer would have little difficulty, I believe, in reading the poetry of Rimbaud; he might not like it but he would know why. But a Greek musician confronted with a piece by Webern, let us say, would be unable to pass any judgment whatsoever, because he would hear no musical sounds, only noises.
Thus while in the other arts an original vision may often seem to be the result of a change of style or method, in poetry an original and in itself nonverbal vision seems the necessary precondition for a change in the handling of the language.
Most arguments about how poetry should be written seem to me futile because they conceal the real difference between the parties, which is their respective notions of the proper poetical subject, what poetry should be about.
As an example of one of Mr. Dickey's poems, let me cite "Part Song, with Concert of Recorders." I choose it because it is a song, and of all kinds of poetry songs are the least personal and most verbal.
This poem is a little ballad, a melodramatic dialogue between a lady and her doctor-lover, who has just murdered her husband. In each of the seven five-line stanzas, the first line ends with the word there or where, the fourth and fifth lines with the word care…. A lucky chance of the English language gave Mr. Dickey two rhyme words which can be used in a number of different senses, but his use of them, and of a simple, melodramatic situation which might all too easily have been ridiculous, to compose a poignant and resonant parable comes from his personal vision, not the English language.
At present, to judge from [Of the Festivity], Mr. Dickey's speciality is nightmare worlds described in the simplest possible diction. (pp. ix-xi)
[Mr. Dickey's poetry] satisfies the three demands I have made in my readings: the lines speak, something has been noticed, and speech and observation have become the servants of a personal vision. (p. xii)
W. H. Auden, "Foreword" (reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.; copyright © 1959 by Yale University Press, Inc.), in Of the Festivity by William Dickey, Yale University Press, 1959, pp. vii-xii.
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