True technique... consists in skill in achieving a real end, not just in making a poem...

“Patterns of Recent Canadian Poetry,” Culture XIX, 411

Throughout his career, Dudek has insisted that literature must have principally a social role and must engage itself with the actual conditions and issues of contemporary life. Experimental literature consists not of exercises in pure aesthetics but of attempts towards more emphatic, effective and action‑inducing uses of language. Writers are obliged to renew the language not because of intellectual or literary principle but because of society’s need for language as an effective tool of analysis, communication and exhortation.

 

The activist aims of Dudek’s little magazine and small press ventures always extended beyond literature and into general society. When Souster first proposed Contact (then tentatively titled “MAKE IT NEW”), Dudek exclaimed:

 

Goddam it, it’s really what Canada needs. Not only in lichechoor, but in emotions, ideas, personalities, policies, buildings, faces, radio programs, damn weeklies, imitations, conventions, one‑track minds, goody‑goodies, there’s no end to it.

(Letter to Souster, 11 Oct. 1951)

 

Two months later, after Contact’s name had been decided, he wrote to Souster:

 

the trouble with our whole LITTLE INTELLECTUAL culture is the completely psychotic breakup of values, where nobody shares anything with anyone else, nobody can bear to talk to any one for more than five minutes. We do not even share an admiration for the four greats of our time, YEATS, JOYCE, ELIOT, POUND: if we did at least that we’d have the makings of a unified culture, the basis for a common understanding. There’s been an earthquake. Can anything be done to sew the earth together? “Sow” the earth together? At least try to get at each other again, and make “Contact.”

(11 Dec. 1951)

 

Dudek’s sense of a social duty for literature (“sewing the earth together”) had roots deep in both his life and in his doctoral research. His early poetry was strongly coloured by leftist convictions, not only about social injustice but also about the role of art as an instrument in bringing about social change. Many of these poems had overt political messages, like “A Factory on Sunday”:

 

That yellow chimney against the sky

……………………………………

Is a tower built for a strange god.

……………………………………

 

. . . it is also the bossed bludgeon

Of the ape‑man and barbarian

A symbol of his lust for power

Set in the ground to stand

In the sight of the cowed and beaten.

Then, most of all, it has the mystery

Of an occult Egyptian censer

Held in the hands of priests,

Sending incense down to the people,

Making them bow down and pray.

(Collected Poetry 5)

 

Although Dudek’s leftist ideas weakened once he moved to New York and came under the influence of the aristo­cratic values of Trilling, his sense of literature as an instrument for cultural change was sharpened by the research to which Trilling, Barzun and Neff directed him. Dudek wrote his dissertation about Carlyle, Thackeray and Dickens, all men who had used their writing to speak directly to society about itself. Of the three, Dudek pre­ferred Carlyle, who took a crusading “stand for integrity” rather than, like Thackeray, creating “literary compro­mise” or, like Dickens, giving “compliance” to “popular taste.”

 

His life’s aim was practical and constructive. He wanted to provide a social morality, in essence the morality of all past ages, but self‑imposed by men in every walk of life, until the levelling democracy should become a heroic aristocracy, a society in which the best and highest were honoured and en­couraged . . . Poetry as purely aesthetic lyric and sen­timent he discarded as a worthless and decadent stage of literature . . . What Carlyle looked for was the true poem of his age, the imaginative and pas­sionate statement of historical truth, a work to take the pulse of the time in which he lived.

(Literature and the Press 226‑228)

 

Dudek became increasingly impressed with those twen­tieth‑century poets (Pound, Eliot and Joyce) whose work also constituted a “criticism of culture” “in the Carlyle tradition” (Literature and the Press 228). Speaking of the early modernist period, Dudek declared in 1963,

 

a conception of poetry emerges which is more ambi­tious and original in its desire to explore total reality than poetry had ever been in the past. But this new poetry could not break through without attacking the entrenched conformities binding literature and soci­ety. And therefore the new poetry became terribly concerned with society and reality . . . You see this in James Joyce, in Ezra Pound, and in T. S. Eliot. Each of these is a culture‑critic on a grand scale . . .

(“The Little Magazine” 218)

 

In 1950, however, this concept of literature as “a passion­ate statement of historical truth,” as a crusading, cultur­ally responsible activity that participates in the mainstream of the intellectual and political life of its time, was neither the dominant one in North American acade­mies nor one which Western society itself had been interested in encouraging. There were many rival and more favoured theories of literature: the romantic, the surreal­ist, the aestheticist, the mythopoeic. But Dudek rejected these theories as culturally escapist and irresponsible. To him, romanticism and surrealism were products of a mental laziness which blurs the hard, substantial nature of reality:

 

I’m against New Romantic softness, loose mental muscles. I’m for Pound’s objectivity and hardness, the personality chastened by contact with reality, and poetry hardened by fact, the stinking facts, or the seen. No mush. Well, one can experiment with sur­realism, but it’s so easy to get lost in that jungle. Po­etry is about something, says something.

(Letter to Souster, 18 March 1952)

 

Aestheticsm was the result of the timid man’s wish to escape from the demands of the material world into a realm of Platonic form—to avoid content and embrace “pure” design, “pure” beauty, “pure” art:

 

the tendency of our civilization in the past . . . has often been to move away from its relation to the real currents of life; where by “real” I mean purposeful, related to the physical basis of life, work for suste­nance, economic necessity, et cetera . . . Our Western civilization, therefore, has largely been falsified throughout by its idea‑lism, its unpragmatic values, its tendency to build spiritual castles in the air. No less than a complete revision . . . is now required.

(“Academic Literature” 1‑3)

 

Dudek was especially disturbed by the mythopoeic or “visionary” theory of literature, popularized by Northrop Frye in the 1950s. Frye’s assumption of an eternal pattern was the antithesis of Dudek’s interest in the changing particulars of the present moment; further, because Frye’s theory originated in Canada, it threatened Dudek’s hopes of making a socially engaged realistic literature an effective part of Canadian culture. He has therefore criticized and condemned Frye almost continuously since the mid‑1950s.

 

I revolt against a view of literature that sees it as “abstract story patterns” with “interchangeable motifs that can be counted and indexed.” I oppose the tyranny of a view which claims that “mythology as a total structure, defining as it does a society’s religious beliefs . . . is the matrix of literature, and major poetry keeps returning to it.” I do not want to keep “returning”; I want to go forward. And I believe that literature does go forward, as human thought goes forward.

 

With Frye, all the meaning is to be found in the past, or elsewhere than right there on the page . . . I want multiplicity, and actuality, and a forever‑expanding field of unpredictable useful meanings.

(“The Psychology of Literature” 369)

 

Louis Dudek, date unknown

All these theories of literature—the romantic, the surrealistic, the aestheticist, the mythopoeic— assumed one thing that was anathema to Dudek: the separation, in whole or in part, of art from life. They stressed the surface properties of art—its exotic imagery, its assonant language, its formal patterns, its plot structure—at the expense of attention either to the explicit cultural message of the work or to the cultural implications of its form. Often they glorified form isolated from significance. When they encouraged interpretation of form, they discouraged the application of this interpretation to extraliterary phenomena. They diffused the tension between art and life by transforming poetry into a commodity which the culture could comfortably absorb and patronize: the “work of art.” Thus Dudek remarks of the early culture criticism of Pound, Joyce and Eliot:

 

After this initial attack on existing culture . . . the first modern poets came to be accepted by the scholarly fraternity and soon were placed on a pedestal of critical adulation. Their original function was virtually ignored, just as most teachers ignore Shelley’s early atheism and revolutionary activity. The mere complexity of art is more interesting because there the teacher can shine, and the student can be proven to be dull‑witted.

(“The Little Magazine” 218)

 

For Dudek, poetry was an instrument of social transformation:

 

Anyone who reads a good poem with understanding—a poem that bites into the evil, or that retrieves a truth—creates an order in himself. Every person who does this, who opposes the life‑destroying forces of modern life with the assertion of full humanity as one finds it in the best poetry of our time and past times, is helping to make men free, true to their greatest capability of work and happiness.

(Preface to Cerberus)

 

From 1950 onward, Dudek made it his major task as a writer to develop a poetic method which would defy all attempts to reduce a poem to an aesthetic object or a cultural commodity:

 

The death of poetry is its reduction to a purely ornamental, or “cultural” function; we must scrap the ornament and come back to meaning.

(“Où sont les jeunes?” 25)

 

He began writing in a style that contained few of the conventional characteristics of poetry: strong rhythm, rhetorical syntax, regular rhyme schemes, indirection of statement, ambiguous imagery, overt tonal patterning. Dudek carefully avoided any element which a critic or reader might be tempted to deal with separately and apart from the intellectual intent of the poem. Denotative meaning became the dominant element of his work.

 

Dudek deliberately tried to prevent his readers from divorcing the form of his poetry from its content or from admiring the form while ignoring the content. Unfortunately, this way of misreading literature more often originates with the reader than with the poet. Form invariably equals content and is inseparable from it. Even deliberate literary “ornament” carries a message about the seriousness of the writer, his or her fears or pretentions and the extent of the poet’s commitment to a subject. That teachers and scholars have been able to isolate the form of such works as Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s "Wasteland" almost completely from the cultural criticism they contain—so completely that the culture can “respect” the poems while continuing to practice the values those works condemn—reflects not on the weakness of the works but on the determination of the culture to neutralize literature as a force for social change. As Jean‑Louis Baudry remarks, “Society . . . can tolerate and indeed appropriate every revolution ‘in art’ (so long as it preserves the artistic nature of the object of literary or visual production), in other words, it consigns the object back into the consumptive circuit” (23).

 

When Dudek attempted to counteract this characteristic of his society, he took on a responsibility that brought with it serious handicaps, risks and challenges. The first poems in his new meditative and denotative mode were the book‑length works Europe (1954) and En México (1958). The apparent theory for these books followed in 1958 (“A Note on Metrics,” Delta 5, October 1958) and 1959 (“Functional Poetry: A Proposal,” Delta 8, July 1959). “A Note on Metrics” presents the argument that “metrical convention has nothing to do with the beauty of poetry”; “the iambic tradition” makes it “easiest to be concerned with technique.” Poets must “drop the a priori metre out of consideration” because it encourages them to neglect responsible statement and to confine themselves to the comfortable but escapist world of pure technical accomplishment:

 

You thus neglect the essential music, which is that of your sounds as they fit the content of your poetry, and you produce for the most part an empty rattle of sounds.

(Selected Essays 114)

 

“Functional Poetry” shows how the content of a poem can take such precedence over its aesthetic elements that all of the latter become of minimal importance except as effective media for the content. Dudek’s announced aim here is to reverse “the loss of ground to prose / over the centuries / in the subject matter of poetry,” to make poetry once again “capable of dealing with philosophical and metaphysical questions.” This, he suggests, has been the unfulfilled and unrecognized aim of most of the great modernist writers of this century:

 

As I understand it, this has been the objective

of all modernist experiment (in English)

since 1910, in French

since Laforge and Rimbaud at least)

Call it               a return to the parting of the ways

between poetry and prose.

………………………………………………………

. . . I go back always. to the first free moderns

Lawrence, Aldington, Eliot (then), Pound (1915)

Lee Masters (yes! Sandburg too)

for the beginning of what we need: straight language

and relevance to our real concerns.

 

In the latter sections of his “prospectus” for a new poetry Dudek attempts to describe the kind of writing he hopes to see. It is to be a “poetry of exposition and discourse” based on speech and yet lifted above “shapeless pouring prose” by “rhythm” and improvisation. Such a theory definitely does not comprise, as Dorothy Livesay concludes, in an otherwise excellent essay, an “eighteenth century critical position” (27), for most of the mechanical qualities of prose are to be avoided through the spontaneity of “straightness” of the utterance.

 

Write whatever you write (for print, or letters)

not as prose, but as rhythmic poetry

(you will find the way)

                 ……………………………………………….

i.e. some form of, improvised rhythmed speech.

which is divided and shaped

by the run‑on and end‑stop system of notation.

 . . . poetry having the shape of clouds.

(Delta 8, p. 6)

 

The resultant writing will be “shapely” in the way in which nature's works are shapely—through the artless­ness, directness and improvised quality of their presen­tation. In poetry as in nature, form and content are equivalents (“the shape of clouds”); the manner of a poetic statement can never exceed its substance.

 

These two theoretical statements, plus Europe and En México, mark a decisive turning point in Dudek’s career, the point at which he makes a full commitment to place the needs of his culture ahead of personal literary repu­tation and advancement. This was an extremely coura­geous decision in view of the predominantly aestheticist critical climate of North America during the 1950s and in view of his own proven talent for producing exquisitely rhymed and patterned verses.

 

In the early poems in East of the City (1946), The Searching Image (1952), Twenty‑Four Poems (1952) and The Transparent Sea (written 1943‑54 and published 1956) Dudek’s style was undefined. Poetry as plain statement and poetry as the construction of complex aesthetic ob­jects were both clearly evident in East of the City and particularly in the numerous political poems. In some, technique merely served the purpose of denotation. The poet presented a consciousness that was concerned pri­marily with its social vision and not at all self‑conscious about its words:

 

I know for certain that these digging men

nudging each other with their elbows, pushing the drill left,

scoop clay from under the rump of profit and finance.

Digging here and in the next street, today or tomorrow,

something will finally happen, a bank will sag,

a building sway like a fork on a prong;

with shouting and throwing from side to side, the houses

will fall into the digger's arms. The Stone Age will be gone.

(“Building a Skyscraper,” East of the City 44)

 

In others, the syntax was more complex and unnatural; the phonemic repetitions were distracting, the images strained and encumbered with adjectives. These poems were highly literary, ostensibly as much concerned with verbal construction as with social issues:

 

Out of the ruptured cauldron, the green factory

Whose ogre eyes gleam in the sooty night,

Railed wrists stretch over hard, broad hills,

the cold coal and straight strata, iron and steel;

The belly boils, and peal its shattering bells

Of hammers and cranes, flying their halleluyas.

                        (“East of the City,” East of the City 45)

 

In the majority of poems in East of the City, the poet’s consciousness was engaged with nature rather than with society. In many of these poems, the range of the poet’s response to nature, and therefore the range of the lan­guage, was limited by romantic conventions: the poet as isolated, solitary observer of trees, ferns, the moon, clouds, leaves, stars, attractive women, blossoms:

 

STATELY tree. See what moves

between you and me. Love.

For I have learned wisdom from trees.

(“Tree,” East of the City 7)

 

In form these poems ranged from free verse to sonnets. In the sonnets, complexity of form tends to overpower meaning much as verbal complexity does in the collec­tion's title poem. In the few poems which successfully blend formal beauty and clear statements, echoes of other poets intrude, as in the Yeatsian elements of this ending:

 

And I, watch how she stood

…………………………….

lost in such leaves which few understand

was then no longer lonesome, cracked, and fool

as I had been before,

but I might sing and send the world to school

with such for company, to make others wise

as an old woman is, or is a child.

(“An Old Woman,” East of the City 9)

 

The central deficiency of East of the City is simultaneously thematic and technical. The lyrics to moon and tree ap­pear to be from a different pen than those poems which attack the materialism of society and its callousness to­wards the working class. The former are largely medita­tive, romantic and self‑obsessed; the latter are declarative, realistic and socially committed. Clearly the poet Dudek is both realistic and romantic, assertive and introspective, an admirer of nature and critic of man. None of the technical means used in East of the City is, however, adequate to combine these contradictory ele­ments.

 

In The Searching Image (1952) and Twenty‑four Poems (1952), Dudek continued to display a large potential for technical virtuosity but no particular style of his own. Imagism, which was helping him rid himself of his conventional romantic images for natural phenomena, was now a major influence on his work; a large number of the poems open with a vividly presented visual scene—“The jewelled mine of the pomegranate, whose hexagons of honey . . .” (Searching Image 5); “Pale from the storm’s mouth / the white clouds move out . . .” (Searching Image 2). The Searching Image has the wider range of technique. There are comic stanzas of vers de societé:

 

I dreamed I was sitting with God on my knees

while three unhappy hanged men whistled in the trees;

a stream was flowing by of curdled blood and milk

with a lady in the current wrapped in blood‑red silk.

(“Come on, Mr. Freud,” Searching Image 8)

 

At the other extreme is an early example of the meditative rhythms of “functional poetry”:

 

And so the emotions

combine into exquisite

counterparts of the mind and body

when the moving principle and the natural limits imposed

work against each other, give in,

and resist.

(“Line and Form,” Searching Image 12)

 

Twenty‑four Poems consists mostly of highly imagistic poems in free verse. A single image presented without comment often makes up the whole of the poem (“A Small Rain,” “Noon,” “A Morning Walk”). In “A Small Rain,” the poem grows through the amplification and clarification of the original image.

 

Evening. With the thin rain falling.

A sky like moonstone.

And here, a slender tree, at street‑edge

one branch pointing left

skyward,

another, thin, slanting to the right.

(Poem XVIII)

 

Intermittently, these poems provide flashes of Dudek’s ability to produce intrinsically arresting effects. In some, these effects are more distracting than enhancing.

 

...a woman and child

in a white wafer, standing on sepia sand,

sways, swathed in volutes and veils of violet.

(“Local Colour, Night Lights,” Poem XXII)

 

In others, the playful rhyming of consonant, vowel and syllable serves both to reinforce and to lend complexity to the dominant denotative connections of the poetry as in these variations on [ae], [a] and [ir]:

 

the pleasure I had, I had; so had the third,

The cat; and some no doubt was reserved, in measure

For the bird. The rest is only an abstract stir,

Neither suffering nor having joy in my thought of fur.

(“The Bird,” Poem IX)

 

Although published two years after Europe, Dudek’s collection The Transparent Sea (1956) dates mostly from the same years as his first three books. The work spans twelve years of his career, and the style is again inconsis­tent. However, few of these poems contain such linguis­tically decorative passages as do the poems in The Searching Image or Twenty‑four Poems, probably because when assembling this later collection of work not pre­viously published in book form, Dudek deliberately chose poems that fitted his new “functional” aesthetic.

 

Whether written in traditional or improvised verse forms, the poems of The Transparent Sea tend to be medi­tative and reflective rather than imagistic. For the first time in a Dudek collection, the consciousness expressed in the book is dominated by the reasoning process rather than the perceptual process. Dudek presents himself here as a man who worries about events, meanings and issues, rather than one who sees the visual world with special clarity, vividness or sensitivity (as he did in Twenty‑four Poems). In fact, The Transparent Sea implies a shift in Dudek’s sense of the poet's identity from one who sees more clearly than other people to one who dares to think more deeply and dangerously. The poet accepts those perplexing contradictions in experience which challenge our faith in reason:

 

the wise may draw what often cannot be

built at all; or if it can be, is ignored.

Insulted by the ear that waits for facts,

set aside by active men,

stalked by disease and death, as all men are,

drowned in the apparent chaos of these times,

artists and scholars walk their quiet ways,

echo the pain that other men should feel, and understand,

and make their voices heard as something seen,

above all sound.

(“Meditations over a Wintry City” 27‑28)

 

The Transparent Sea contains enough early poems to suggest that this alternative version of the poet's role was always present in Dudek’s writing, though in the beginning it was largely masked by his interest in imagism and by his attraction to romantic convention and pure form.

 

The shift in Dudek’s primary sense of the poet's role, reflected both here and in “Functional Verse,” provided him with the technical solution that was so obviously lacking in East of the City—a solution which enabled him to unite the responding and feeling self of his "romantic" poems with the critical and realistic self of his polemics. These selves became linked by meditation. The poet not only perceives phenomena, experiences emotions and reacts politically but also reflects on perceptions, experiences and reactions as phenomena in their own right. The essential subject matter of the long poems Europe, En México and Atlantis becomes not his external experiences (as it is in his imagist poems), not his subjective experiences (as it is in his “romantic” lyrics) and not his political beliefs, but his reactions to his own feelings, perceptions, beliefs, etc. The philosophical poem becomes process rather than message. As Dorothy Livesay remarks, it is no longer didactic proposition but a “consideration of possibilities” (27). The lines of the poem appear to follow the syntax of consciousness rather than the syntax of considered composition, in that they contain more appositions and phrases than clauses.

 

We can’t give them up, though,

in middle classes

of new America.

In Provincetown, home of the Fathers,

coming to meet the old

out on a sandbar.

 

The tone becomes tentative by virtue of the addition of questions and qualifications:

 

. . . the tourists

scattered on the sand,

……………………….

we among them, as you said;

“the town gets the better of us”

But does the Atlantic

ever to be remembered?

 

The poems can take surprising turns when new images appear to enter the poet’s consciousness during the meditation and interrupt its apparent direction.

 

Look how the birds

are diving against each other!

Almost, the curved water catches them.

That’s how we are, in the void,

between the now and hereafter!

(“Provincetown,” Transparent Sea, 106-111)

 

This meditational mode, which combines thought and feeling in an open phenomenological structure, becomes the essential poetic of Dudek’s later long poems. Its openendedness allows a poem’s development to be limited only by the duration of the poet’s meditations; its use of the syntax of consciousness precludes ornamentation and admits ordinary as well as intense experience. Thus the poetic becomes “functional” not only by making possible direct expression of personal reactions but also by opening up mundane events to poetic examination.

 

 

WORKS CITED

Baudry, Jean‑Louis. “Censorship and Ideology.” Afterimage 5 (Spring 1974): 23.

Dudek, Louis. East of the City. Toronto: Ryerson, 1946.

“Functional Poetry: A Proposal.” Delta 8 July 1959): 1, 6.

Literature and the Press. Toronto: Contact Press, 1960.

“Patterns of Recent Canadian Poetry.” Culture 19 (December1958): 399‑415. Reprinted in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson, 1968. 271‑285.

Preface to Cerberus. Toronto: Contact Press, 1952. Reprinted in Selected Essays and Criticism, 1978, 27‑28.

The Searching Image. Toronto: Ryerson, 1952.

Selected Essays and Criticism. Ottawa: Tecumseh Press, 1978. “Academic Literature” 1‑3; “A Note on Metrics” 111-115; “Où sont les jeunes?” 24‑26; “The Little Magazine” 217-221; “The Psychology of Literature” 362‑380.

The Transparent Sea. Toronto: Contact Press, 1956.

Twenty-four Poems. Toronto: Contact Press, 1952.

Letters to Souster; mss. in the collection of Lakehead University Library.

Livesay, Dorothy. “The Sculpture of Poetry.” Canadian Literature 30 (Autumn 1966): 26‑35.