“The basic prosodic principle at work here is one Justice learned from his lifetime study of meter: the establishment of a pattern and variation on it. [...] ’Men at Forty’ has all the clarity of shape of the most formal poem because it is a most formal poem. Justice’s most effective writing has often taken the form of free verse because it has caused an even greater fidelity to the subject.”
(CS 33)
“[Justice says] ‘If in a novel the great event is likely to be a death or wedding, in a poem it may well be a sentence, a line, a phrase or just possibly a single word.’”
(CS 26)
“The last line [of 'The Map of Love' by Donald Justice] comes right with a click like a closing box’ (as Yeats put it); it wants to gather and culminate all that has preceded it, and it does.”
(CS 25)
“When Justice’s poems fail, it is usually because they are eviscerated by self-conscious irony, mannerism, and literary poses of spiritual exhaustion [...]. Justice’s poems are best when it does seem that ‘he had to write about the subject he took and in that way’ (changing Eliot’s emphasis from had to he), when his style seems a discipline to contain his urgency, a way to make the subject pervade the poem, as if (as in Eliot’s poetry) such powerful emotion had to be powerfully muted in order to be objectively realized.”
(CS 23)
“This, then, is Justice’s signature, too: the poet’s emotion is withheld while the poem’s material is presented.”
(CS 21)
“Given ideal skill, a poet certainly argues implicitly for a particular kind of poetry by writing his own poems the way he does, but he also writes the way he does simply because he hasn’t any other choice. Stevens put it better when he said, ‘I write the way I do not because it pleases me, but because no other way pleases me.’”
(CS 21)
“[In the poem 'The Summer Anniversaries'], when the poet-at-age-ten exclaims ‘O brave new planet! – / And with such music in it,’ we are probably expected to understand that, in contrast to Miranda in The Tempest (‘O brave new world / That hath such people in’t!’), this particular child prefers music.”
(CS 20)
“[...] desires for the wholly mysterious and the wholly comprehensible can be satisfied only in and by the work itself.”
(CS 19)
“Justice would agree with Flaubert that ‘Poetry is as precise as geometry,’ but would probably note with irony that we now know that even basic axioms can only be proved within closed systems. Each of Justice’s poems is a closed system.”
(CS 19)
“For the Justice of The Sunset Maker, the chief function of art is to preserve what little it can of life. [...] Justice is a poet of a world in which loss is ubiquitous, sorrow inevitable, and adult joy always bittersweet, a world in which the genuinely heroic act, for a literary artist, is not to thrash about uncontrollably, raising a manic and ugly din, but to fashion a body of work whose beauty and poise and gravity in the face of life’s abomination may, one trusts, help it to endure.”
(CS 17)
