Table of Contents:
  • I. On Being a Poet
  • About Jamaica
  • Journeys through Bookland
  • Poetry at Columbia
  • A License to Dream
  • Dogface Poetics
  • Postwar Years
  • Dead Horses and Live Issues
  • Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain
  • On Being a Poet in America
  • Rhythm
  • Vanishing Angel
  • II. Reviews and Essays
  • W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle and Thom Gunn's Fighting Terms
  • A Garland for the Muse: Reviews of Books by J. V. Cunningham, Denise Levertov, and Anne Sexton
  • Important and Unimportant Poems: Reviews of Books by William Stafford, David Ignatow, Robert Duncan, W. S. Merwin, John Betjeman, and Maxine W. Kumin
  • Silence in the Snowy Fields
  • Demons All Along
  • A Swift kick in the Rhetoric
  • new Books of Poems, 1
  • New Books of Poems, 2
  • Apollinaire! The Perfect Romantic
  • The Failure of a Poet
  • The Heart of the Cabbage
  • Poetry in the Sixties: Long Live Blake! Down with Donne!
  • An American Shape
  • The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz
  • American Poetry Anthology
  • James Merill's Divine Comedies
  • The Split of Lives of W. H. Auden
  • lowell's Indissoluble Bride
  • Not Made for the World of Moloch
  • III. Life and Work
  • What's in it for Me
  • Advice to the English
  • Capturing the World as it is: An Interview with Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly
  • To Make Words Disappear
  • The Poetry of Searching: An Interview with lawrence R. Smith
  • Everyone Knows But the Poet (What Poetry Is): An Interview with Kraft Rompf
  • Preface to Seraching for the Ox
  • Rolling Up
  • The Hour of Feeling
  • A Race that Has Not Yet Arrived: An Interview with Beate Josephi
  • William Carlos Williams's idea of Poetry
  • Reflections on Narrative Poetry.