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 mind-forged manacles that shackle modern poetry. There is no modish trifling with chaos and madness here, none of the Cartesian gimmicks of the Symbolist élite. Ciardi, like Robert Lowell and Stanley Kunitz and a few others, has recovered the Romantic sense of existential subjectivity that lay buried under T. S. Eliot's strictures about the "objective correlative" and Ezra Pound's notion that the poem must present "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time …" Time in Lives of X is never a frozen instant, but becomes instead a vehicle for the existential encounter between poet and world. The moments of epiphany, Wordsworth's "spots of time," embody the crisp sensations of a Hemingway or Joyce short story:
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