Poetry Criticism | Wagoner, David - Arthur Oberg (essay date 1977)

Arthur Oberg (essay date 1977)

SOURCE: A review of Collected Poems: 1956–1976, in Poetry, Vol. 130, No. 3, June, 1977, pp. 162–67.

[In the following review of the Collected Poems, 1956–1976, Oberg concludes Wagoner is a major poet.]

David Wagoner's Collected Poems brings together selections from two decades of writing, three hundred telling pages of verse. If poetry at one level is always a hoarding procedure in the service of love, this book is a particularly generous one. In the face of so much contemporary poetry which is tritely minimal or narrowly confessional, Wagoner's collection acknowledges large intentions for poetry in a voice which can range from the loudly exuberant to the movingly quiet. Wagoner admires the gaiety of language always at the disposal of the poet, while acknowledging the need to return to those reserves of silence which inform and help define speech.

Titles of some of the...

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