Wagoner, David (Vol. 5) | Wagoner, David 1926–
Wagoner, David 1926–
Wagoner is an American poet, editor, and novelist endowed with a "lyrical ear and an alert but disciplined imagination." Themes of innocence and corruption, of the individual trapped in a violent society, recur in his tragicomic novels. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)
Though his eight books, as I mean to show, have nourished and renewed one another, the poems gaining precisely the humanity and texture of reality we look for in the novel, and the novels acquiring that "abandon, wild calculation and seriousness" which James Dickey locates in Wagoner's poetry; though the four volumes of poetry alternating with four novels since 1953 have garnered a lot of cross-pollinating praise, it is surely because they insist so securely on being poems and novels that most of us have still to discover this writer's contribution to our literature. That is just it: Wagoner will not come out from behind his literature,...
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