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☙ 49 3 ❧ Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes As the title of his fourth book suggests, The Face Against the Glass (1950) presents Francis as an observer, alone and cut off. Indeed, it was written during what the poet called “a period of crisis,” when he often spent evenings in his house hiding from people. After 1944, the nearly complete rejection of his work by publishers and the feelings of failure it summoned caused him to withdraw, turn inward, and doubt seriously his ability to continue as a poet.1 “I wanted to crawl into a corner out of sight,” he recalled in his autobiography, “partly because I had no heart for being with people and partly because I wanted to brood on some basic questions” (83). It is curious, therefore, that, writing around the time of the Beats and confessional poets, Francis refuses to address his personal life and thereby exploit the acute anxiety born of his shattered confidence. This is not to say that he avoids showing us his troubled side or keeps hidden what vexes him. Rather, his poetry is a reminder that the immediate sensation and emotion we prize in some of our poets need not preclude the quieter dramatization of feeling, emphasized by understatement and indirection, which Francis claims as his own. Critical commentaries on his work, however, rebuked Francis for refusing to report on his suffering and to document the turmoil in his life, a complaint that appears to have its origins in the vogue for confessional poetry. Robert Lowell and his followers, whose work marked a distinction between—in Claude Levi-Strauss’s terms—“raw” and “cooked” poetry, took it for granted that good writing ought to approach autobiography and C h a p t e r t h r e e 50 ❧ consist of a naked disclosure of private misery. Some critics saw in Francis ’s controlled, mannered reluctance to write about personal suffering a failure of nerve that, worse yet, suggested the irrelevance of his work to contemporary life. Norman Friedman first sounded this view of Francis’s poetry in a critique of The Orb Weaver (1960)—a volume that included half a dozen poems from The Face Against the Glass—that appeared in the Chicago Review (1967). Friedman praised Francis’s technical skill and delicacy of insight but regretted that his writing contained “no rage for order , no torment within to resolve, no sense of the emptiness of life, no turbulent relations with other people” (69). Dudley Fitts made a similar point in the New York Times Book Review in April 1966. He implied that while there was much to admire about Francis’s “quiet competence” in clothing his “delight in natural beauty” with precision “in patterned language ,” the poet’s style failed to arouse passion. “Everything seems to be here except the one element that I could not possibly document,” he averred, “the fire” of unrestraint “that finally seals a poem” (46–47). Francis was partly responsible for helping to engender a critical consensus that made him seem out of step with contemporary poetic taste. In “Poetry and the Human Condition,” a short essay written late in his career and published in the Painted Bride Quarterly (1988), he set himself apart from “confessional poets” who, he felt, pandered to “a prevailing mood” that saw life as a source of anguish, and whose dramatized real subject is the temper of the poet. “Confession and especially confession of suffering are so common,” Francis wrote, “that a poet who doesn’t suffer or who doesn’t write primarily about his suffering is thought to be no poet at all but only a writer of verse” (58). Not surprisingly, The Face Against the Glass avoids mention of his personal discouragements and persistent selfdoubt , distinguishing it from the work of confessional poets popular at the time. Alternating between celebration and meditation, its mostly pastoral offerings contrast sharply with Lowell’s painful poems of private history in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and Theodore Roethke’s Freudian forays into the unconscious in The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948).2 But Francis is dark in ways that his critics do not suggest. He is willing at times to face anxieties of the psyche and disturbances of the spirit. Some of the best poems in this collection show his capacity for dwelling in uncertainties and straddling extremes, which he explores as a tension between his desire for unselfconscious oblivion and the death of self he knows...

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