There are a variety of opinions on Louis Dudek, but few have been found in print. In conversation, most Canadian poets and critics will make a judgment, but only Frank Davey has produced a book on Dudek, and even Davey splits his volume between Dudek and Raymond Souster. There have been only three major articles published—all in Canadian Literature. Even the reviews are slim. His early books received the same two or three notices one would expect for a new poet, but his later works have seldom done much better. 

Northrop Frye’s early praise of Dudek’s contribution to Unit of Five was noted above. He suggested a real possibility of later achievement: “Dudek’s poetry, I hope, looks to the immediate future, to a wider and sounder appreciation of poetry, and to a corresponding increase of the poet’s self‑confidence.”[1] B. K. Sandwell’s reaction to the same book was quite different: “How angry Mr. Louis Dudek is I do not know, for I cannot profess to understand most of him, and what I do understand seems hardly worth understanding.”[2] 

E. K. Brown had found this selection of Dudek’s work to lack any “core of unity,”[3] and when he came to Dudek’s own book, East of the City, he reflected, “Perhaps what one misses most is what Mr. Finch has in such perfection, the distinctive power over words, the individual word, and the arrangement of words in broad units.”[4] A. J. M. Smith also found himself comparing Dudek with Robert Finch, but without slighting one for the other: “It is a quality of manliness, as contrasted with Mr. Finch’s gentlemanliness, which distinguishes the latest and best of Mr. Dudek’s poems. . . .”[5] 

It would seem that Smith here is touching on the distinction which Dudek himself would have made between his own work and Finch’s. At the same time, Earle Birney saw in East of the City some of the qualities that Dudek had just attacked in his First Statement article, “Academic Literature.” Quoting from that article, Birney singled out “ ‘a preference for word‑patterns rather than poetry’ and ‘for the unnatural exploitation of the vivid image’”; yet he also saw a quality in Dudek which the latter would have esteemed: “Dudek has that rare gift of the true poet, the ability to savor the most ordinary experience with the freshness of a child and to write about it with the subtlety of an adult.”[6]     

In reference to Cerberus, Frye continued his praise of Dudek, elevating him well above the other contributors, Souster and Layton. Frye’s assessment of the development of Dudek might say more about Frye’s prejudices than about Dudek’s poetry, but it is of interest in light of Dudek’s later work:

 In deference to his colleagues, Mr. Dudek endeavours to recapture some of his earlier feeling for social problems, but it is clear from his manifesto that he is no longer in danger of confusing poetry with popular rhetoric. He realizes that the enemy of poetry is not social evil but slipshod language, the weasel words that betray the free mind: he realizes that to create requires an objective serenity beyond all intruding moral worries about atomic bombs and race prejudice.[7] 

Europe immediately presented itself as something worthy of note. Margaret Heideman stated, “A poem so large in scope and intent is a signal event in Canadian poetry.”[8] But by the end of her review, she suggested that the various flaws in the work make it at best an ambivalent pleasure. Milton Wilson had a similar mixed feeling, although he began with the negative: “At first, as the long line of platitudes started to file past in limp, undistinguished verse, I was frankly incredulous. I had not supposed that Mr. Dudek, whose talent I respect, could be so unabashedly dull.”[9] 

The discursive nature of the poem led many to note the scent of Ezra Pound, usually seen to be harmful. Mona Van Duyn, in Poetry [Chicago], observed, “One might have been warned by familiar references to ‘Ezra’ earlier in the book, I suppose.”[10] The clearest presentation of this position again came from Northrop Frye:  

The century of meditation is a fatal idea for a facile poet, and although at his best Mr. Dudek escapes being merely facile, I find large stretches of the book unrewarding. In the first place, the influence of Pound is oppressive. Pound is everywhere: the rub‑a‑dub three‑ and four‑accent line, the trick of snapped‑up quotations and allusions, the harangues against usura, the toboggan‑slide theory of the decline of Europe after the Middle Ages, and so on. In the second place, the conversational style brings the ideas into sharp relief, and the ideas are commonplace, prejudice reinforced by superficial tourism.[11]  

Wilson, on the other hand, suggested that Pound’s presence is not all to the bad: “. . . in a cathedral or the Wordsworth country, he has eyes and convictions, and the influence of Ezra Pound, so deadly when Mr. Dudek is not operating at high efficiency, is now life‑giving.”[12] 

When The Transparent Sea, a selected poems, appeared, Kildare Dobbs attacked directly: “Most of his work is forced or insipid; but posterity will remember him as the man who played Billy Graham to Irving Layton’s Messiah.”[13] A more reasoned and probably more accurate judgement came from Chester Duncan: 

One is often so grateful for Mr. Dudek's prolificacy and so fearful of the narrow donnish strictness that he avoids that one wants to take it all and damn the analysts. Yet in the future it’s going to be difficult to prove that he is a good poet except in his capacity as phrasemaker.[14] 

Laughing Stalks, a collection of satires, and En México came out at much the same time, and so were often reviewed together. The general reaction seems to have been to praise En México, with limitations, and to reject Laughing Stalks. Desmond Pacey, however, reversed the process with the following comment on En México: “This is much the weaker of the two books—a kind of meditative travelogue à la Europe. Platitudes are dressed up to masquerade as wisdom, but the disguise is usually only too transparent.”[15] Frye was not wholeheartedly won by Dudek’s version of the long poem, but he judged En México to be a major improvement over Europe: “In this poem Mr. Dudek has matured his technique of indented lines and parenthetical rhythms, and the gentle rocking sway of this meditative poem is full of a contemplative charm.”[16] Yet Al Purdy seems to have grasped the ambivalence that governs critics of Dudek’s verses in a very personal reaction to Laughing Stalks and En México: “These are capsule, chile con carne philosophy and observation, good or bad depending on your perspective to Popocatepetl or Montreal. They are not trivial, downright bad, to be dismissed lightly. (A good poet wrote them.) But they’re not my dish.”[17]

Louis Dudek, circa 1948

By the publication of Atlantis in 1967, the ambivalent critic had become de rigueur. Len Gasparini suggested something different: “Louis Dudek’s book‑length quasi‑epic might be unopprobriously labelled ‘The Great Late Un‑Canadian Poem,’ or ‘The Wanderjahr of a Middle‑Class Canadian Poet in the Old World.’”[18] His final judgement, however, was not dissimilar from the norm, perhaps best represented by Peter Stevens: “Atlantis is an uneven poem, filled with sections of sweep and movement, pulled down by rather prosaic, meandering and haphazard intellectualization.”[19] 

Besides individual reviews, there have been three major articles written on Dudek's work. “A Critic of Life: Louis Dudek as Man of Letters,” by Wynne Francis, has been quoted from already. It is essentially biographical, a description of Dudek’s career as a man of letters, with “a secure place in the history of modern Canadian literature” (p. 23). Douglas Barbour, in “Poet as Philosopher,” emphasizes Dudek’s attempt to present a reasoned essay in poetry, something quite different from the poet as “incredible madman”:  

Pound was just such a madman, but Dudek pleases us most when he is rational, meditative, the philosopher to be listened to and argued with, but not possessed by.  

We are overburdened these days with “possessed” and “incredible” madmen in poetry. But there is no one else to speak to us in the reasonable, honourable, voice of intellectual integrity that is Louis Dudek’s. Too many younger writers have been ignorant of his work and the possibilities for poetry that it represents.”[20] 

Francis and Barbour are informative, but they provide few of the novel insights which Dorothy Livesay provides in “The Sculpture of Poetry.” This entire essay is of value, but some brief references can suggest Livesay’s position. She asserts that Dudek’s early work is “concerned not with sound effects so much as with pictures in rhythmic arrangement.”[21] She continues by maintaining that his later works, apparently so prosaic, have a similar base: “Quite frequently the poems seem to lack drama and dramatic tension, but they are a true rhythmic mirror of the poet’s intention. No word or phrase can be taken away; none can be added” (p. 31). By careful and detailed analysis of the stress and all aspects of sound, she decides, “Sound harmonies then, together with a beautifully balanced phrasal pattern, enhance the conceptual conclusion which is the theme of all Louis Dudek’s poetry: that harmony and order in nature towards which mankind strives” (p. 35). In her estimation, Dudek is “the contemporary Canadian poet most consciously concerned with shape, form and sound: the origins of rhythm” (p. 26).

 During 1980‑81 Frank Davey single‑handedly did much to increase awareness of Dudek’s work. Davey’s belief in Dudek’s influence on Canadian poetry has already been noted in a quotation from From There to Here. Davey’s special issue of Open Letter, Louis Dudek: Texts & Essays, begins with a still more polemical statement:

Through this collection we believe Dudek’s centrality to Canadian poetry will become indisputably apparent. His work binds Smith, Scott, and Klein to the writing of the present generation. It links Canadian writing to the great modernist descent from Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Williams. It holds McLuhan’s examination of mid‑twentieth‑century technology tightly to the context of the modernist struggle to achieve value and meaning despite the overwhelming dedication to commodity of the culture at large. Dudek is a successor to Pound, standing unshadowed in the company of Bunting, Olson, and Spicer. His long poems, the first major modernist poems in Canadian literature, open up formal possibilities which are later to dominate important work by Marlatt, Bowering, Nichol, Lee, and Kroetsch. As Wynne Francis has noted, Dudek is also the first “man of letters” in Canada, the first to follow Arnold and Pound in combining poetry, criticism, polemic editing, and cultural criticism into one multi‑faceted cultural vision.[22] 

Davey’s major statement to date on Dudek is his book Louis Dudek & Raymond Souster (1980). As one might expect from Davey’s other comments, he is most at home when examining Dudek’s longer poems, but at times he seems so much at home he becomes Dudek’s apologist. In discussing how the form of Dudek’s poetry responds to poetic intent, he asserts:

Dudek would probably consider Atlantis a near perfect poem. The poem corresponds almost exactly to the aesthetic and moral theories it propounds. The few very moving passages in which Dudek exerts the full range of his artistic power to display a passionately perceived situation are confined to those relatively infrequent moments when “paradise” reveals itself. . . . Until the very end, most of the poetry in Atlantis is desultory and unremarkable, like the world the poet perceives. When Dudek finds only trivia and boredom, which happens most of the time, he responds faithfully to the experience and resists all temptation to “dress” it up with rhyme and rhetoric. (pp. 76‑77)

 This would seem quite in tune with Dudek’s latest attempts in Continuation I  to produce a long poem which is a casual accounting of the poet’s experiences. Still, Davey’s argument seems like a cunning justification of banal verse: boring poetry is acceptable if its purpose is to depict boredom. 

On the other hand, Davey’s analysis of Europe succeeds in elucidating a method which may be apparent to most readers but usually seems unexplainable: 

Although arranged chronologically, its ninety‑nine sections in no sense form a narrative; the story of Dudek’s travels is not the subject of the poem. The poet’s reactions are continuous with the poem’s aesthetic premises; Dudek consistently recoils from sham, hypocrisy, avarice and self-importance but warms to honesty and authenticity. Europe thus has a wholeness, an integrity of vision in which language and form obey the same moral view that informs the poet’s opinions and judgements. (p. 54)

 This comment on the link between language, form, and a moral vision is very close to what Davey identifies as Dudek’s general philosophy:

Aesthetics are an extension of moral vision. This belief, which has been a prerequisite to most of the great art of the world, is seldom respected in Canada where writers have usually struggled to achieve competence rather than greatness. Thus Dudek’s work has not been intelligently or sympathetically received. Yet his work is courageous precisely because it sacrifices popularity in order to strive for something remarkable. (p. 81)

 The other central tenets identified by Davey and linked to this moral vision are Dudek’s rationalism and modernism. Davey asserts that as Dudek developed, he turned from a dependence on Imagism, what Davey refers to as “the perceptual process” (p. 50), to a devotion to thought, which Davey presents as “the reasoning process” (p. 50). Later in the book, Davey states, “Dudek’s first criterion, ‘the ability to think,’ relates to the rationalist bias that pervades all his poetry and criticism except Literature and the Press” (p. 89).

 Davey’s reference to “all” Dudek’s poetry seems to contradict his claim that Dudek’s concern moved from the image to the idea. It has already been noted, however, that Dudek was devoted to both idea and image, regardless of the conflict between perception and reason. Davey himself provides a partial explanation in his synopsis of Dudek’s personal form of modernism:

Throughout his mature work Dudek has espoused an evolved modernism which seeks a transcendental vision expressed in temporal form and idiom and rooted in the here and now. He makes his primary commitment to historical time and cultural realities. His modernism is humanist in its attachment to contemporary life but antihumanist in its belief in transcendent vision as the ultimate artistic goal. (p. 162)

Dudek’s attention is on things humanistic. His basic method is formed out of Imagism. But the result which he seeks from this attention and method is transcendent. Dudek himself presents the most clear working out of these conflicts in “The Theory of the Image in Modern Poetry,” in which he concludes, “A poem, of course, is partly about experience and existence as we know it. But its greatest power, if it is a true poem, derives from the faint hint or suggestion it gives of that other, unknown world of being.”[23]

 Davey’s careful analysis will probably do much to increase interest in Dudek’s work, but it seems likely that Dudek will maintain his ambiguous position on the Canadian poetic ladder. For those interested in quantification, the Supplement to the Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature (1973) gives him 115 lines. This places him ahead of Souster, Scott, and Purdy but behind Layton, Reaney, and Birney. His Collected Poetry was termed by John Robert Colombo to be “the best—and most overlooked—book to appear in the last decade.”[24] Mel Dagg equivocated slightly before asserting that “. . . this collection reveals him to be one of Canada’s finest poets.”[25] But, for the most part, the ambivalence continues; as Michael Hornyansky observed:

Still, for all my skepticism about building visions from incremental fragments, I’[26]m fascinated enough to revisit. Is it because of the ideas and hints so richly poured forth, showering sparks and echoes, a warehouse of material for a make‑it‑yourself poem; or is it because of the immense energy of the man, surging and pounding away (with credits to Ezra) at the untameable universe?[27]