Dugan, Alan (Vol. 6) - Dugan, Alan 1923–
Dugan, Alan 1923–
An American poet, Dugan received the Pulitzer Prize for his first collection, Poems, in 1962. Called "strictly contemporary, strictly American," his poetry continues to reveal intelligence, inventiveness, and a preoccupation with daily realities.
By cultivating what is by any standard a confining style, and by exercising his caustic intelligence on a relatively narrow range of subjects, Dugan has created a significant body of work that speaks with authority to a variety of modern readers. One does not get terribly excited about Alan Dugan's work, but one nevertheless returns to it with increasing regularity, for it successfully inhabits that middle ground of experience which our best poets today seem loathe to admit, as though to do so would somehow in itself constitute a denigration of their talents and a disavowal of intensity. (p. 43)
Dugan's spirit is best expressed in the conditional, which is to say that...
[The entire page is 1887 words long]
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