Volume 44, Number 5 · March 27, 1997
Living Ghosts
By John Bayley
Lament for the Makers
by W.S. Merwin
Counterpoint, 89 pp., $19.00
The Vixen
by W.S. Merwin
Knopf, 70 pp., $21.00
Flight Among the Tombs
by Anthony Hecht
Knopf, 76 pp., $23.00
The Bounty
by Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 78 pp., $18.00
What is the nature of the difference between poetry and—the poetical'? The two cannot be clearly separated and yet they do remain distinct:a distinction clearly apparent to a later generation, after the poets in question have themselves departed for the Elysian fields. What is poetical then begins to resemble a period piece. Could anyone have ever been physically thrilled and startled, stirred and electrified, by, for example, Swinburne's Poems and Ballads? And yet they were. Readers—young readers—knew them at once for the true thing—exciting, authentic, and subversive. Today they move the sympathetic reader in another way: as a poetical voice from the past.
Review, 4317 words
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