“Rich Refusals”: Donald Justice and the New Critics

If we must concern ourselves with ranks and hierarchies, we must admit that no one familiar with the best poetry in the English language would mistake Donald Justice for a major poet. He is no Milton, no Yeats, much less a Shakespeare or Chaucer. Justice is, in fact, unquestionably minor. And yet such a designation need not be condemnatory. One recalls what Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance of that great minor artist, Botticelli: “there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere.” And of that “certain number” Donald Justice is surely one.

Substantially laureled in his time—winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, the Bollingen Prize in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996—Justice’s poems seem, since his death in 2004, poised on the precipice of obscurity. While discerning critics such as Adam Kirsch and David Orr have written recent laudatory pieces about the poems, and while Jerry Harp has published an excellent critical biography, few are the young poets—and fewer the scholars—who seem interested in Justice. This is lamentable. Of course, de gustibus non est disputandem, but one suspects the diminution of interest in Justice’s poetry may result from an imperfect understanding of precisely what in the poetry constitutes the “peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere.” Id est, the virtues of Donald Justice’s poetry are uncommon among poets of the past sixty years, and are, perhaps, uncommonly subtle. Indeed the poems run the same risk hazarded by the poems of Housman, Frost, and Edward Thomas—namely, the risk of being under-read by their readers.

Publishing his first volume, The Summer Anniversaries, in 1960 and his second, Night Light, in 1967, Justice appeared on the field of American poetry amid the disheveled phalanxes of Beat Poets and Confessional Poets, among whose bloodcurdling howls his own soft-spoken, elegant laments might have been entirely drowned out, were it not for the fact that, as David Orr notes in the New York Times, “sometimes his poems weren’t just good; they were great. They were great in the way that Elizabeth Bishop’s poems were great, or Thom Gunn’s or Philip Larkin’s. They were great in the way that tells us what poetry used to be, and is, and will be.” In our own time, we have, perhaps, more difficulty than in previous generations appreciating what is great in Justice, as our ears are in the unfortunate habit of paying most attention to what makes the loudest crash, and Justice is a poet of reticence, not one of bravado.

Justice may be adequately understood among his contemporaries as a poet of “rich refusals,” in the sense that he refused to abandon the impersonality and restraint of his New Critical predecessors while many poets of his age cast them off for poetries more personal and forward in nature. And yet this view of Justice, which has long been standard among critics, presents only half the picture. What Eliot tells us in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” must not be forgotten: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Viewed exclusively within the context of his vociferous contemporaries, Justice is properly understood as a rather demure poet; viewing him, however, within the context of his predecessors, one begins to see another facet of the poetry—namely, its extravagance. In this essay I will endeavor to analyze Justice’s relationship to the New Critics, and will demonstrate how Justice’s refusal of the New Critical attitude toward abstraction, coupled with his refusal to abandon those techniques most prominently associated with the New Criticism, creates the fundamental tension in his poetry—a tension in which speakers bound in time strive ineffectually to regain the purity and unity lost...