Volume 10 173
Many critics, like Thomas McClanahan, praise
the proud dignity and relentless honesty of Dugan’s
work: “He faces the world precariously, unwilling
to flatter his own ego at the expense of accurate de-
scription or truthful insight.” McClanahan goes on
to observe, however, that “Dugan’s curious watch-
ing is at once his strength and his weakness as a
poet.” A number of critics argue that this weakness
outweighs his strength. J.D. McClatchy, reviewing
Dugan’s New and Collected Poemsin Poetrymag-
azine, writes that “By his third book it was appar-
ent, and by the fourth and fifth too obvious, that
Dugan was plowing a very narrow field. It is not
just that his misanthropic tone had hardened into a
mannerism, but that it prevented access to larger,
more complex areas of experience.” McClatchy
goes on to characterize Dugan as “another burnt-
out case.”
Dugan’s work has fervent partisans and de-
tractors, but his poetry is recognized by both as be-
ing at the fringes of the contemporary scene. This
is not necessarily a valid judgment of the ultimate
worth of his poetry, however. As McClanahan
states, “Given the quality of his writing and the
dearth of comment upon it, it is not wholly unre-
alistic to predict that Dugan might well become one
of those enigmatic poets in American literature who
is never really heard until he has stopped speak-
ing.” Dugan himself would surely appreciate the
irony of that.
Criticism
Paul Witcover
Paul Witcover is a novelist and editor in New
York City with an M.A. in Creative Writing and Lit-
erature from the City University of New York. In
the following essay, he discusses the use of irony
and allusion in Alan Dugan’s poem, “How We
Heard the Name.”
In the Dictionary of Literary Biography,
Thomas McClanahan says of the poet Alan Dugan,
“If he can be said to write from any one vantage
point, it is that of objective alienation, a perspec-
tive that allows him to stand apart from situations
and comment like an old man who has seen and
heard it all.” This quality of objective alienation,
which might also be called ironic detachment, is
the predominant tone of Dugan’s early poem, “How
We Heard the Name,” written in 1956, when the
poet was thirty-three. It is somewhat counter-intu-
itive that a poem as rigorously objective and emo-
tionally reserved as this one can nevertheless speak
to readers in a moving and personal way. Yet such
is the case.
The title of the poem, “How We Heard the
Name,” promises readers an account of an event or
series of events. Its tone is colloquial, as if the story,
whatever it may be, is about to be related over a
glass of beer at a local bar. Like all good storytellers,
the nameless narrator of this poem—who speaks not
just for himself but on behalf of a group of people,
hence the “we”—is very much aware of the expec-
tations of his audience. Storytelling, after all, is a
kind of public performance, as is poetry, for that
matter. Recall that the earliest epic poetry, like that
of Homer, was an art of the spoken and chanted
word. Although written on the page, this is a poem
readers are to imagine being spoken by a fictional
character who is relating certain events to a fictional
audience. Robert Browning and, more recently,
Robert Frost, were masters of this type of poem,
which falls into the category of dramatic poetry.
Imagine, then, that this poem, this story, is be-
ing told in a tavern (the precise identity of the set-How We Heard the NameEngraved profile of Alexander the Great (356-
323 B.C.), the Greek conqueror Dugan names at
the end of his poem about the evolutionary
impact of history.