Volume 20, Number 2 · February 22, 1973
In the American Grain
By John Ashbery
Collected Poems of John Wheelwright
edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld
New Directions, 278 pp., $12.50
Collected Poems, 1951-1971
by A.R. Ammons
Norton, 396 pp., $12.50
Tape for the Turn of the Year
by A.R. Ammons
Norton, 205 pp., $2.25 (paper)
The pure products of America don't always go crazy: Dr. Williams himself is a demonstration of this. But the effort of remaining both pure and American can make them look odd and harassed—a lopsided appearance characteristic of much major American poetry, whose fructifying mainstream sometimes seems to be peopled mostly by cranks (Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Stevens), while certified major poets (Frost, Eliot) somehow end up on the sidelines. This is suggested again by the unexpected appearance of two voluminous Collected Poems by two poets who now seem destined to pass abruptly from the status of minor to major cranks.
Review, 3678 words
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