When Hecht was our Visiting Lariat, I made a scathing comment about Logan at Discerning Eye. He cornered me after my reading at London's Royal Festival Hall, saying "I'm the guy you referred to on the Internet as 'That idiot, William Logan.'" I told him how angry I was at his churlish dismissal of Tony's new book and of Wilbur's Mayflies, and he challenged me to refute him in discursive prose, which I do not write. Instead I wrote him this flyting and challenged him to respond in like stanza:
To a Critic
“The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.”
--W.B. Yeats
The grand seigneurs are few
who write well in old age,
who rise and stand erect
on Pindar’s vacant stage.
I have known only two,
Dick Wilbur and Tony Hecht.
Another in recent years
took Thomas Hardy’s hand
and labored up the slope
where Delphi’s columns stand
and Mount Parnassus rears:
the Aussie, Alec Hope.
Hope’s “Western Elegies,”
Wilbur’s “A thing well made”
and Hecht’s “Musical chair”—
go seek them in that glade
under Mnemosyne’s
nine daughters’ loving care,
the Muses who select
among the dumb and young
few who will learn so much,
write wisely or so long
as Hope, Wilbur, and Hecht—
masterful men whom such
as you will never touch.
So now Dick has the glory of being treated just as shabbily as Hecht and Wilbur, the latter of whom responded to my poem in like stanza:
"In future should some jerk
From Gainesville denigrate
The merits of my work,
I shall not hesitate:
I'll just say "Sic 'em, Tim,"
And thus get rid of him.
To answer your question, Paul, I have Belonging in manuscript, and I think it includes some of Dick's most affecting poems. It is encouraging to me to see a guy five years my senior extending his range and doing his best work at a time of life when too many poets have burned out. So much of Dick's best early work is bitter and informed by his long experience of exile, that it is a pleasure to see him mellowing and "Belonging" with the approach of age.
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