A History of American Literature

444 Making It New: 1900–1945

series of remembered and recurring experiences which belong almost entirely to

the subrational levels of life. Hunting, or more generally the expedition into the

wilderness, supplies the framework for much of Dickey’s work: for his most famous

novel, Deliverance (1970), and for many of the poems in his numerous volumes

from Into the Stone (1960) to The Early Motion (1980) and The Central Motion

(1983). Its incidents are frequently his subjects, its rituals supply him with a language,

and its code prescribes the nature and scope of his perceptions. It is during and by

means of the hunt, the errand into the wilderness, that many of Dickey’s narrators

achieve contact with the subliminal dimensions of experience – go down into the

ground, as it were, to commune with the inhuman. For writers like Ransom or Tate

that may be a single past, identified with a singular historical figure or culture. For

Dickey, however, there is not one “father” but many “fathers”: many pasts, battalions

of the dead who exist within us whether we like it or not – and who speak, not only

to us, but through us.

Outside the South, the convictions to which the Fugitives gave such spirited

expression animated many writers, among them Yvor Winters (1900–1968),

J. V. Cunningham (1911–1965), and Richard Eberhart (1904– 2005). A distinguished

critic as well as a poet, Winters published his Collected Poems in 1952. And his poetry

pursued the same priorities as his criticism. To achieve “the final certitude of speech,”

Winters believed, the writer had to reflect and select. He had to use a rigorously

disciplined form, containing concise and rationally controlled reflections on

experiences of moral significance. At first, his own pursuit of precision led Winters

towards Imagism: poems that mixed Imagist instantaneity with his own special

brand of rational reflection. He soon felt, however, that Imagism lacked intellectual

backbone and convincing structure, so he moved away from it toward more

traditional forms, through which he could comment lucidly and concisely on

experience. “The fine indignant sprawl,” he wrote in “On Teaching the Young,”

“/ Confuses all.” Far better was “corrosion and distrust”: a healthy skepticism, a keen

eye for cant, and a willingness to refine so as to produce something “small but good.”

Cunningham, whom Winters admired, was if anything even more drawn toward

compressed, close-woven forms of speech. Some of his best work consists of

epigrams. All of it tends toward the laconic or lapidary, the language pure to the

point of austerity, the verse movements precise and poised. His seven volumes were

brought together in The Collected Poems and Epigrams (1971); and, throughout that

volume, there is a characteristic blend of wit and sadness, metrical severity and

verbal subtlety. His is a voice that resists the urge toward transcendence, and offers

no solace, no comfort other than that supplied by clear understanding. Sometimes,

he makes his traditionalist leanings very clear. A reference, for instance, to “Ambitious

boys / Whose big lines swell / With spiritual noise” in “For My Contemporaries” is

an unambiguously sardonic comment on the influence of Whitman on American

writing. More often, however, his belief that the best work is done “By caution under

custom’s guide” emerges from the tone and texture of his verse. To What Strangers,

What Welcomes (1964), for example, is a set of poems on the familiar theme of

traveling westward. Cunningham makes it unfamiliar and his own, however, by

GGray_c04.indd 444ray_c 04 .indd 444 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM