Gradations of Grandeur

Carrie MacKinnon was a personnel officer for a large Toronto insurance company.

Ralph Gustafson has had a long career as a writer and critic in Canada. Gradations of Grandeur, a 75-page poem, “sums up the essential experiences of a lifetime of devotion to the two Muses of Poetry and Music, to the civility of the intellect and the splendour of the human dream, and to the great monuments of civilization,” says the book’s back cover.

This is a revision of a poem originally published in 1979. The author used the opportunity of three ensuing years to re-work the original release and concludes, “The whole has now been perfected: the continuity is assured, the thought decontaminated, the music is perfected.”

Any claims to perfection, in poetry or any other human endeavour, beg for challenge. Such minor human foibles as typographical errors might not, perhaps, detract from poetic perfection. But a collection of verse which neither moves nor persuades — which remains, finally, coldly distant, though re-worked — is nowhere near the perfection wrought by those poets divinely inspired: Muse breathing life into thought and expression.

Gustafson begins each page with an Ezra Pound-like statement of belief (“The universe is up to something,” for example) and then follows it with a verse exploration of it, though the connection between the two is sometimes obscure. Gustafson’s style is deliberately “poetical,” eschewing transitive verbs entirely, but without conveying a sense that this style implies a pared-down discipline of thought and expression. References and images which are obscure, and unrelieved by author’s or editor’s notes, doom many potentially powerful verses to utter unintelligibility. The reader is forced to conclude that this “intellectuality” betrays an aristocratic disdain for common understanding, normally one of the fundamentals of poetic expression. Those little anecdotes of the human drama that are explained are interesting but do not contribute to a sense of the opus accumulating towards something.

Gustafson’s language is one step beyond the verbal shorthand that poets use to illuminate the world to mere mortals; its brevity, its compactness have become a cryptic code to which the poet alone is privy.