Like Sinyavsky, Ciardi has been deemed a subversive by certain mealy-mouthed inquisitors, but his true subversiveness eludes the wranglings of House committees. For Lives of X strips away the "old lies" to reveal the rag-and-bone shop that surrounded the youthful poet's growth to manhood:

                              As I was born—
    To dim red glows I sensed but could not read
    except to know there are Presences, and to learn
    the first of everything is a lunacy
    whose chatter starts before us in the dark.

The Orphic voice is subversive in that it breaks down the subject-object distinctions of the Cartesian mind, puts us in touch with the chattering lunacy (the curling sea that circled the rim of Achilles's shield) that precedes us in the dark. Ciardi follows Wordsworth and Frost in molding the blank verse to the flowing immediacy of his remembrances, and in so doing explodes some of the...