William Dickey

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Several Tongues

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William Dickey's poems in Of the Festivity offer many patterns. He is ready, on balance, hurrying here, hesitating expressively there. His topics provide him with opportunities which he deftly picks up. For an example of pace, variety, and exploitation of what the current brings, here is the last portion of a poem entitled Minotaur:

        Where you will meet me first is no great matter,
        A casual leaf that flutters in your face,
        A spider or a dog. More like the latter,
        Running, and all at once it is a race,
        And where you turn, I win, and in that place
        I shall learn silence, and you will learn grace.

This fluency impresses the reader throughout the book.

W. H. Auden [see excerpt above], retiring from his job as editor of the Yale series, tells in a six-page foreword how he went about the process of selecting manuscripts…. About Of the Festivity, he provides examples to show how the book satisfies [his] three tests.

Auden is persuasive, and he carries several kinds of authority in whatever he says; but sometimes he appears to provide distinctions more absolute than actuality will sustain: "A practicing poet is never a perfect editor: if he is young, he will be intolerant of any kinds of poetry other than the kind he is trying to write himself; if he is middle aged, the greater tolerance of his judgment is offset by the decline of his interest in contemporary poetry." A sentence like this stirs up a stutter of qualifications, among them this: Might some practicing poet, instead of being tolerant of the kind of poet he himself is, be antagonistic? Might he shy away from recognizing someone doing his own job well?

William Dickey does jobs well that the later Auden approves. The earlier Auden, however, I believe might have judged differently in this certain way: he had purposes that grooved his talent. A young poet might do well to guard against working to get full approval of middle-aged guides, especially overwhelming middle-aged guides, and even more especially overwhelming middle-aged guides whose sense of direction depends on a kind of determined virtuosity. William Dickey shows in some later poems that he may be better than those who approve him think he is. (pp. 250-51)

William Stafford, "Several Tongues" (© 1960 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry and the author), in Poetry, Vol. XCV, No. 4, January, 1960, pp. 248-57.∗

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Excellence and Variety

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Introduction to the Poems of William Dickey