The New York Review of Books

The pure products of America don’t always go crazy: Dr. Williams himself is a demonstration of this. But the effort of remaining both pure and American can make them look odd and harassed—a lopsided appearance characteristic of much major American poetry, whose fructifying mainstream sometimes seems to be peopled mostly by cranks (Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Stevens), while certified major poets (Frost, Eliot) somehow end up on the sidelines. This is suggested again by the unexpected appearance of two voluminous Collected Poems by two poets who now seem destined to pass abruptly from the status of minor to major cranks.

Both John Wheelwright and A. R. Ammons are full of tics and quirks; both frequently write as though poetry could not be a vehicle of major utterance, as though it were itself a refutation of any such mythic nonsense; in both the poem is not so much a chronicle of its own making as of its unmaking. Often, as in Ammons’s “Working Still” or Wheelwright’s “North Atlantic Passage,” the final product looks like a mess of disjointed notes for a poem. Yet each poet finishes by stretching our recognition of what a poem can be and in so doing carries the notion of poetry a little higher and further. Each seems destined to end up, albeit kicking and struggling, as classic American.

Unexpected is perhaps not the word for the publication of Wheelwright’s Collected Poems; it was first announced on the jacket of a small pamphlet of his Selected Poems published by New Directions in 1941, a few months after Wheelwright was killed by a drunken driver in Boston at the age of forty-three. Why the present volume has been in the works for so long is not explained, and is all the more inexplicable in view of Wheelwright’s close ties with so many well-known writers of his time, to whom many of the poems are dedicated: Robert Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, Matthew Josephson, James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, Howard Nemerov, Horace Gregory, and Wheelwright’s brother-in-law S. Foster Damon, to name a few. If at least some of these were his close friends it seems strange that no one, including James Laughlin (another dedicatee), has managed until now to rescue this brilliant poet’s work from obscurity.

Perhaps there was some kind of opposition from the family, and one suspects also that many of the writers with whom “Jack” was on close terms appreciated his engaging personality and odd political views (Boston Brahmin-Anglo-Catholic-Trotskyite) but drew the line at his “recalcitrant” (the apt word is that of his editor, Alvin Rosenfeld) verse. Three volumes—Rock and Shell, Mirrors of Venus, Political Self-Portrait—were published in his lifetime by the Boston publisher Bruce Humphries in tiny editions and have long been unobtainable, as has the New Directions pamphlet; a fourth collection, Dusk to Dusk, was ready for publication at the time of Wheelwright’s death and now appears for the first time in the Collected Poems …