Volume 20, Number 14 · September 20, 1973
Can Poetry Be Reviewed?
By Stephen Spender
Moly and My Sad Captains
by Thom Gunn
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 91 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Writings to An Unfinished Accompaniment
by W.S. Merwin
Atheneum, 128 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Braving the Elements
by James Merrill
Atheneum, 73 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Wintering Out
by Seamus Heaney
Oxford, 80 pp., $4.00
The Crystal Lithium
by James Schuyler
Random House, 96 pp., $1.95 (paper)
They Feed They Lion
by Philip Levine
Atheneum, 76 pp., $3.95 (paper)
A Change of Hearts
by Kenneth Koch
Vintage, 277 pp., $2.45 (paper)
Poetry is nothing unless it is the breaking up of routine attitudes toward living. There is therefore something sad about reviewing it. For the assumption behind criticism is that routines of technique, vocabulary, tradition, moral attitudes can be extracted from past or from contemporary poetry and applied to the work under review. Yet that work—if it is worth reviewing—contains an element of that which is unique to the poet as a sensibility, uniquely situated in his own life, a historic and geographical space, unprecedented.
Review, 4563 words
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