Volume 25, Number 9 · June 1, 1978
Calculated Risks
By Michael Wood
Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems
by John Hollander
Atheneum, 238 pp., $7.95 (paper)
A Call in the Midst of the Crowd
by Alfred Corn
Viking, 107 pp., $3.95 (paper)
The Selected Poems: 1951-1977
by A. R. Ammons
Norton, 109 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Wit has an odd place in poetry. Even in Shakespeare and Donne it arouses suspicions before it diverts them into pleasure. In Marvell it is a complicated line of defense; in Pope it is a form of mastery; in Byron a form of recklessness. In none of these cases is there any question of what A. R. Ammons calls 'the uninterfering means' of poetry. The means here are all interference, the mind cuts capers between the poem and the world.
Review, 3218 words
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