Wagoner, David - Richard Howard (essay date 1965)
Richard Howard (essay date 1965)
SOURCE: “David Wagoner,” in Alone in America: The Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, Thames and Hudson, 1970, pp. 533–51.
[In the following essay, Howard surveys and praises Wagoner's works, emphasizing in the development in his novels and poetry a poetic intelligence that wrests a sense of positive identity from a vision of negation.]
David Wagoner, in his forties and a professor of English, is as well the only writer his age I can think of in America today who is, by the difficult criteria which hold the noun together with the adjective in solution, en gelée even, both a successful poet and a successful novelist. What I mean, of course, is that he is not entirely—not merely—a Success, not a success like Allen Ginsberg, say, or Norman Mailer. If you manage to be a success like that—and in America today, management appears, surely, to be the best way to do it—you...
[The entire page is 7870 words long]
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