If John Donne, when he wishes to ("At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow/ Your trumpets, Angells"), can sound like the fanfare of a brass choir, if Robert Lowell, in his early "Lord Weary’s Castle," could sound like an Old Testament prophet revived as a 17th-century homilist, if Milton in Paradise Lost can sound like the diapason of a fivebanked, 20-bellowed organ, then the poetry of Carl Dennis—modest, unassertive, wry, self-deprecating, witty, Chekhovian—must sound like light summer rain on the roof of a porch: gentle, almost unnoticed, but calmly reassuring.

In a period that has seen the birth, spread, and nearly the calcification of "confessional poetry," of virtually shameless self-exposure, the work, the literary persona of Dennis, is astonishingly evasive, for what I think are sound aesthetic reasons. The most he has allowed his publishers to reveal about him is that he was born in St. Louis in 1939, attended schools in the Midwest and California, and has been for many years a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Something about this native reticence may be represented by his poem called "Strada Felice." It’s about Gogol’s long residence in Rome, during which he wrote his mordantly comic and distinctly Russian novel, Dead Souls. The choice of Gogol and his expatriate life is significant. Formalist critic Yury Tynyanov observed, "One of Gogol’s basic devices in his portraiture of people is that of the mask." Gogol began his literary career pseudonymously, and was never to exhibit a more purely "Russian" quality than in a work written at a distance in time and space from his native grounds. And this serves as a serious parable about the literary artist. Aswoon in the first fine rapture of love, a poet may not be best situated to write love poetry. It may be that "distancing" is a valuable artistic technique, and that a persuasive vividness, an authenticity of detail, is best secured by imaginative re-creation rather than by instantaneous diary entry. The distance of an author from his work is also an element of his tact, a quality important to the work of both Gogol and Dennis, as well as that of Flaubert, Henry James, Dickens, Keats, and Stevens.

This "distancing" has its wryly amused obverse in the poet’s licensed daydream as described in "Readers." If poets were truly what Shelley called them, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," they would be a force so powerfully subversive of all the Great Powers as to be in constant danger of arrest and imprisonment, for "originality" is by definition antiestablishment. But the glamour of this view of poets as heroic criminals in a furtive underground, while still seriously entertained in some quarters, is derisively delusional from another point of view, and the notion of the literary underground may be not so much an elected one as one quite simply imposed by the utter neglect and disregard of the public at large, and therefore required by the poets to maintain their self-respect. (The completeness of this disregard needs little attestation, but I recently reported with glee to an Irish acquaintance that Seamus Heaney had won the Nobel Prize in literature, to which the response was a blank stare and the silence of indifference.) But as though to correct the ironies of delusional grandeurs implied in "Readers," Dennis has written what amounts to a companion poem in "Listeners," a truly touching poem in its essential modesty which, at the same time, urges us to recall that the slightest of our words, the most casual of our assertions, have consequences that reverberate, for good or for ill, far beyond our awareness or intentions.

Finally, Dennis’s genuine concern with the kinds of aesthetic problems I have mentioned is beautifully evidenced by such quietly brilliant poems as "Igor" and "To Be Continued," in which the cunning intermingling of literature with what we habitually regard as "reality" becomes a seamless, sometimes heart-breaking fabric in which poetry lives and has its being.

Dennis’s six collections of poetry—A House of My Own (1974), Climbing Down (1976), Signs and Wonders (1979), The Near World (1985), The Outskirts of Troy (1988), and Meetings with Time (1992)—are uniform in their excellence, if in nothing else whatever. This poet is distinguished by the variety as well as the originality of his imagination, and he deserves a far larger audience than he has yet attained.