How We Heard the Name
Written in 1956, “How We Heard the Name” ap-
peared in the multiple award-winning Poemsof- While Alan Dugan’s verse had been pub-
lished in magazines prior to 1961 (he received an
award from Poetrymagazine in 1946), it would be
difficult to exaggerate the impact of his first col-
lection. As Helen Chasin wrote in reviewing a later
volume, Poems 4:“Never a promising young poet,
Dugan showed what he could do, which was con-
siderable, in his first book.”
“How We Heard the Name” is typical Dugan.
The poem concerns a chance encounter between a
soldier and a group of shepherds in the aftermath
of an ancient battle, but with Dugan the “about-
ness” of a poem can never be reduced to subject
matter alone. Its tone ironic, its language colloquial,
“How We Heard the Name” is a mordant rumina-
tion on history, ambition, and identity. It is a deeply
personal poem yet also a deeply impersonal one. It
is, in short, a bundle of artful contradictions held
together by an idiosyncratic sensibility. Writing in
The Dictionary of Literary Biography,Thomas Mc-
Clanahan stresses the “equivocal stance” adopted
by Dugan toward his subject matter, his readers,
and, most of all, himself: “He is in many respects
both observer and participant, withdrawn and in-
volved, writing from a distance about things that
matter greatly to him.”
Alan Dugan
1956
166 Poetry for Students