The Poetry of Garrett by George Garrett

First published:The Reverend Ghost and Other Poems, 1957; The Sleeping Gypsy and Other Poems, 1958; Abraham’s Knife and Other Poems, 1961; For a Bitter Season, 1967

Critical Evaluation:

When a poet has made his mark, sharp and distinctive, on the language of poetry (whether that mark is felt immediately as influence upon his contemporaries or not), he can be said to have succeeded in his craft, to have excelled in his art. Of the younger poets in America who have come into their own or begun their progress since World War II, few have made that mark. There are, of course, Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell, both of whom are of the first order, and there are those shaggy poets, the Beats, who made themselves heard collectively if seldom singly. And there are some younger poets, testing their abilities and finding their strengths, avoiding both the dull drone of the academy or the hysterical howl of the streets of night. Among these young poets is George Garrett, best known perhaps for his novels and short stories, who is a poet of true distinction with a voice clearly and originally his own.

The poems, collected so far in his three books and appearing in journals, were written during and, without being topical and thus temporally restricted, speak for the last twenty years, from 1947 to the present. Garrett is a poet of the cold war years, striving in his verse to understand and accommodate the lost world of heroism and faith, the traditional realm of poetry, to this age of anxiety, shattered hopes, and leering fears. His poetry records a personal journey through the army and a time in Rome, his years in school and after, the growth of his love into a family, and his own growing recognition of his frailty and his mortality in a world in which everything tastes of death and where every skull grins a lewd secret. It is a dark journey, an Augustinian journey through life, fraught with doubts and terrors, lighted by love and a real faith in God and His awesome and awful grandeur, and in the human spirit with its failings and its real achievements.

Garrett’s personal odyssey is but a part of his poetry, the mainstream with connecting smaller streams of amazing variety. He has written witty poems of genuine eighteenth century satirical brilliance (“Three from the Academy,” “Four Characters in Search of a New Dunciad”); he has evoked the moods and essences of real places (“Fall Landscapes, New England,” “In North Carolina,” “Crows at Paestum,” “Old Slavemarket: St. Augustine, Fla.”); he has written poems which approach real people with telling insight (“Congreve,” “Matthew Arnold,” “Caedmon,” “Swift”); and he has re-created larger figures from a real and mythic past (“Tiresias,” “Eve,” “Abraham’s Knife,” “Salome”). This variety is evidence of the vitality of the poems, and that vitality, along with Garrett’s technical skill, gives the poems, for all their variety, a real unity of vision and manner.

George Garrett’s poems, first of all, have a clearly recognizable sound, an uncommon virtue among his contemporaries. They achieve a working fusion between the heightened diction of poetic meditation and the fresh and exciting immediacy of colloquial speech—a living voice, a real meeting of thought and word. His rhythms are subtle and widely varied, at times musically regular and at others wildly free beyond ordinary scansion. His images are vivid and functional, seldom drawn for their own sake, always working in their context. But his metaphors are perhaps the most distinctive quality of the texture of his verse; they arise cleanly and crisply from a context of theme. He does not, as is so often the case since Pound and Eliot, make the familiar landscapes and events of this world seem new and significant by giving them metaphorical overtones of man’s archetypal dreams, myths, and faiths; rather, he gives those dreams and fading faiths new life and relevance by clothing them in the things of this real and present world, by incarnating idea in fact.

In “Meditation on Romans,” a long and very fine poem which is deeply religious without being pietistic, as are all of his overtly Christian poems, Garrett uses his kind of metaphor to great advantage, as when he cries out his appeal directly to Christ, a carpenter, a physician, and a king.

Here the universal is made real in the specific, and the specific is a very real present of nails and dollar bills stated in a language as ordinary as its objects and as new and clean as its juxtapositions are unexpected and startling. It is a poem of spiritual doubt and desire made real in words and images of this world, just as soul itself lives in the flesh of a dying animal.

The matter of George Garrett’s poetry is appropriate to his manner, for in those poems which constitute the mainstream of his work he is a seeker, involved in a long and arduous quest for meaning in the madness of this world, for truth in absurdity, for faith in a time of disbelief and doubt, for that lost age of innocence and heroism and purity. He once defined this quest and his view of that old human dilemma in a preface to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a book which is in many ways parallel to much of his own work, when he said that “we still cling to the hope that with the exercise of reason and with a change of heart we may yet have a new birth of history and recover a lost and shining world that haunts our deepest dreams.”

The heroes of the quest are many, for Garrett is no pure romantic who sees only self in everything and describes the world in terms of self. There are true heroes in the ancient sense, the few who have risked everything that they can lose, as he says in “A Bargain”; there are the professionals, those who make their way in the world simply by doing their jobs and who praise God in pragmatic action; and there are the possessed, the saints and sinners alike who are raped by God’s love into vision and purity. The practical buzzard, ugly and beautiful at once, comes down to this world’s business in “Buzzard”; the itinerant and lusty preacher of “Holy Roller” is a con man and a sinner, but he is of the chosen of God.

The most immediate and real of his heroes is the bearer of saving grace in this life, the lover. In his poem “Eve,” Garrett’s wounded Adam is healed only by Eve, a part of himself torn apart, whose hand he takes for all time, finite and infinite. Garrett’s love poems are rich with idea but richer still with a purity of unabashed feeling which is rare in our self-conscious and cynical time. The last stanza of “Proposition” gives at least a taste of the quality of his love poetry, but even love can fail in the poems as in the world. Garrett’s view of things is a dark one, a world of fists and failures, pains of an aging flesh and a corrupted spirit. Lost Eden is long gone, but as long as the vision remains and the artist can give it even ephemeral reality, then that lost purity exists. In his long and surely major poem, “Salome,” he brings together the fallen man and the artist in that doomed dancer’s flesh. She speaks her dreams and her horrors, of the blank and naked face of truth and that saving vision.

Possessed of a dark vision but not one which has surrendered to despair, often bitter, often sorely wounded, George Garrett’s hero strives in this world of transforming figures, sustained by his honest awareness of that world, his artistic vision of a purer world of spirit, and his ability to love and be loved. This is a hero of our time, familiar to us all in life and in art, but seldom figured in poetry with such wisdom and such skill. With a language as lively and as startling as a string of firecrackers, Garrett gives us ourselves and our old dreams made new.

Perhaps the best conclusion to any examination of his poetry is the closing of his poem “For My Sons” in which idea and language are formed, in a way most typical of the best of his work, to shape a litany of the world’s ancient wisdom, echoes of Old Testament knowledge and precept. Here we read the words of a wise and humble man, of an honest and skilled artist whose work is still very much in progress.