TWENTY QUESTIONS.<i> By J.D. McClatchy</i> .<i> Columbia University Press: 224 pp., $22.50</i> : TEN COMMANDMENTS: Poems.<i> By J.D. McClatchy</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 120 pp., $21</i>

If there is some truth to the idea that every book of poems is also a theory of poetry, then that idea is handsomely endorsed by J.D. McClatchy’s simultaneous publication of a collection of literary essays and of his first collection of poems since the memorable “The Rest of the Way” (1990). “Twenty Questions” and “Ten Commandments” endorse each other: The poems present McClatchy’s patent of nobility, his right to pass judgment on his contemporaries, just as the essays demonstrate how far-reaching are the tastes and recognitions that underlie his own verse.

I think probably no American poet-critic since Randall Jarrell has written such beautiful prose or wielded such manifold and supple terms of analysis. McClatchy analyzes poetry as only a poet could, with an insider’s knowledge of the craft--and of the terrors of the blank page. His observations are part of the insider’s quirky know-how. “Wilbur’s poems do not especially gain by being read in bulk--as, say, [Robert] Lowell’s do,” McClatchy will typically remark in an admiring essay about Richard Wilbur, even though McClatchy’s admiration is always tempered by wit and objectivity, even occasionally by mordant humor.

Often, McClatchy will proceed through pairs of contrasting adjectives; “the absurd and solemn, the painful and frivolous” (in describing Stephen Sondheim). In comparing Sondheim to light poets Samuel Hoffenstein and Dorothy Parker, McClatchy says that Sondheim shares “their instinct to invoke conventions--both poetic and social--and then subvert them.” In the same essay, McClatchy (a master of the apt quotation) remarks, “Valery once said that poetry is not speech raised to the level of music, but music drawn down to the level of speech. That is what these songs do: music becomes speech, speech that flickers and gleams within the glass lamp of form.”

In writing about the late James Wright, who marked a whole generation of poets, McClatchy combines a precise critical vocabulary with a gift for quotation. He writes that Wright’s last collection, “This Journey,” is “the most Horatian of his books--if by that term we mean what Auden meant: to look on the world with a happy eye, but from a sober perspective.” The last essay in the book, in fact, is a bright, funny but impeccably correct translation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry.” McClatchy does not deign to insert trendy contemporary references into his translation; as he puts it, “Nothing dates faster than relevance.”

In an essay about W.S. Merwin, McClatchy makes this useful distinction: “There are some poets--Shakespeare, Keats, Browning, Stevens--whom we admire for their transcendent art as it plays over all the embossed surfaces of human life. But there are others--Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson--who we feel were granted a vision, access to the other side of experience.” In discussing “the sublime” as it is sounded in James Merrill’s “Scripts for the Pageant,” McClatchy says, “[I]t is not, like epic or romance, a genre. It is a tone, but a tone raised to such a pitch that it becomes subject matter.” Perhaps Merrill elicits McClatchy’s most perceptive remarks. They were friends and often shared news about their works in progress.

If, based on a close reading of McClatchy’s essays, we were asked to guess at the members in his personal pantheon of English-language poets, we would surely start with Whitman and Dickinson and proceed through Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden and end with Elizabeth Bishop and Merrill. If we stick with just the Americans, such a list immediately proves the point McClatchy made in an earlier book that there is no such thing as a national style: Rather, what we have are congeries of regional styles, if the word “regional” is stretched to include black, feminist and gay poetry.

Whitman’s poetry McClatchy calls “the efflorescence of High Romanticism in American poetry,” “a love of the nation and its possibilities.” McClatchy rejects the idea of Whitman as a yapping barbarian and comes up with the idea of an inspired miniaturist, whose catalogs portray a varied life as detailed and glowing as high medieval book illuminations. In a personal essay about reading, McClatchy tells us that he discovered Emily Dickinson in a class at Yale taught by Harold Bloom. “Like all great teachers, he merely brooded aloud. His questions of a poem--’What exactly, my dears, does Miss Dickinson mean by ‘circumference’?--were nearly always unanswerable, but prompted endless discussion (abruptly cut off by another oracular question on a different matter). The effect of these lessons was only felt hours later, at home, in bed with the book. It was then that I read Dickinson, and listened--because I had been taught to challenge her--as she took the traditional language of belief, emptied it of any reassurance, then charged it anew with a startling force. In their own way, her methods mirrored my teacher’s . . . and became my teacher.”

For McClatchy, the canon is made up of fodder for thought, the works that can be challenged, disputed, responded to in an endlessly fresh dialectic of response. This response is necessarily never stable. For instance, McClatchy asks if a good poem is a dream or a puzzle. A dream he defines as “a text replete with meaning that is mysteriously both proffered and withdrawn.” A puzzle, by contrast, is the patterning that the poem takes on once the poet (or the reader) has “understood its depths and implications.” Then, characteristically, McClatchy adds, “But truly great poems--think of a psalm by Emily Dickinson or an ode by Elizabeth Bishop--are puzzles that remain dreams.”

He divides American poets of this century into decades. The first, including Lowell and Bishop, wrote under the sign of the great modernists (Eliot, Ezra Pound and Auden), whom they desired “both to emulate and inflect.” The next generation of writers, born between 1925 and 1930, which included Merrill, “apprenticed themselves to the New Critics and close reading, were thrown into World War II and a life afterward--uncrowded with poets--that allowed them to pursue individual voices.” The third group (if we skip the barren generation born in the 1930s) came into a violent world between 1940 and 1945, “the first raised to read contemporary poetry and to take their immediate predecessors as models.”

If Bishop has emerged as the most vital influence of the lot, the poet who continues to exert the most impact on the young, it is because she represents a change of sensibility rather than technique. “It’s likely that younger poets learned from Bishop not what to say, but where to look--or better, what not to overlook, least of all in themselves.”

What’s symptomatic about McClatchy’s genealogy of contemporary poets is that it emphasizes each generation’s debt to the preceding one. This sense of tradition marks McClatchy’s own poetry, which not only uses traditional forms but also impersonates historical figures or literary characters. In “Ten Commandments,” there are poems called “Variations on Lines Cancelled by Dickinson,” “Honest Iago,” “Three Dreams About Elizabeth Bishop” (a poem which gets a full analysis in “Twenty Questions”), “Descartes’ Dreams,” “After Ovid,” “After Magritte” and “Auden’s OED” (which is about inheriting Auden’s dictionary). There are ear-perfect imitations of forgotten dialects; in “Slave Song,” McClatchy invents a monologue for an American slave during the Civil War:

He knew my father, my white father

saw him ride in a carriage once,

a great planter who never whipped

his slaves and gave them spoons,

real spoons, not oyster shells. . . .

The technique is Alexandrian in its sophistication. McClatchy hums a gin-soaked, disabused lullaby in one poem; in “Pantoum,” he undertakes a fiendishly difficult rhyme scheme that also demands the regular repetition of whole phrases. In “Dervish,” the lines spin like the entranced dancers. In “My Old Idols” (classed under the First Commandment, of course), there is an evocation of Callas, whose voice was:

Splintered timber and quick consuming flame:

The simplest way to take hold of the heart’s

Complications, its pool of spilt religion:

A long black hair sweat-stuck to the skin. . . .

Here the gift for analogy (that “timber” and “flame”) is joined to a skillful handling of abstraction (“the heart’s complications”), of reference (to the Edwardian definition of art as “spilt religion”) and of odd visual detail (the hair). Similarly, in “Proust in Bed,” there is one long sentence in the fifth stanza that snakes its rippling, unbroken path down through many elaborate line breaks and enjambments.

Although McClatchy includes among his essays a highly personal one about the analogies between pen and penis, literature and sex, his true voice is not one of trumpeting confession but rather of the suave re-creation of other voices. Even in a poem such as “Betrayal,” the reader can’t be sure the sentiment isn’t someone else’s (or generic). McClatchy is at his best as a ventriloquist, as when he re-creates Auden’s witty line breaks and chatty tone in the dictionary poem:

And, as innocent as the future

porno star’s first milk tooth, the dictionary

has no morality other than

definition itself. The large, functional

Indo-European family

will do for a murky myth of origin. . . .

Similarly, this line break in “Chott” perfectly imitates the action described:

Already out there pillars of sand are forming to hold up the sky

For minutes at a time before they buckle and collapse with exhaustion

Humor is never long absent in these poems, but it is a sly, sad wit, characteristic of McClatchy’s great mentor Merrill. In “My Mammogram,” the male narrator responds to the news that he may have breast cancer with Merrillian brilliance, which includes rhyming “pecs” (as in “pectoral muscles”) with “X” (as in “X-ray”) and “sex.” The funniest poem is “Tea With the Local Saint,” in which a visit to a Muslim wise man reveals that sainthood is all grit and no glory:

. . . nights on call for the demons

In a vomiting lamb, a dry breast, a broken radio,

And days spent parroting the timeless adages

Spent arbitrating water rights, property lines,

Or feuds between rival herdsmen over scrub brush. . . .

Just when we’re despairing about the state of contemporary culture, the ubiquitous “lie” and “lay” mistakes, the spelling of “all right” as one word, the certainty that Zurich is the capital of Sweden and that “Richard III” is a sequel; just when we’re confronted with the sorry fact that Elizabeth Bishop’s collected letters (the single most passionate document about 20th century poetry we have) sold only 800 copies in England; just when we must deal with an American literary editor’s cheerful question, “But who is Cocteau?”; just when we’re about to jump off Mt. Parnassus, along comes a poet such as McClatchy to reassure us that the highest, most refining principles are still at play and that they have been applied, first and foremost, to his own poems, which are as new as they are old, as original as they are traditional.