[The poems in An Armada of Thirty Whales] enjoy an access of individual being, whatever influences they preen themselves upon, which results from a pronounced form, uttered and therefore audible. In his brilliant little preface [see excerpt above], Auden is … beguiled by the problems of a modern nature poetry—"the preservation and renewal of natural piety toward every kind of created excellence"—which he sees to be one of Hoffman's overriding concerns…. Auden is right, of course—there is a poetry of "direct observation and description" which Hoffman over and over exemplifies, though it is important to discover that he does so, always, in connection with a ritual or cyclical image of birth, growth, death and regeneration, as here in "That the Pear Delights Me Now," tracing the tree's progress through the months, past the "roystering honeymakers, wholly unaware of the dust their bristles brought," past the fruit and the birds that "follow, thirsting," past the "maggots [that] rapaciously and noiseless fatten on fermented juices," to conclude in [the] epiphany of the ecliptic…. The same seasonal round is observed, in Hoffman's next book [A Little Geste], in "The Beech Tree," and in his newest one [The City of Satisfactions], in "The Tall Maple," but what makes the success of such tree-pieces is not their piety of observed detail, but their worship of Eternal Return: they are prayers in a divine service.

And serving them, as I noted, is a surprising range of formal devices, whose grace and savor will be preserved and enhanced in the poet's subsequent books, both in assurance of assonance … and the control of sense, the discipline of mere significance by more than its cause, by meters and repetitions…. These skills, the inflection of imagery by sound and the ordonnance of meaning by a pattern of rhythmical expectations, belong to a considerable armory: the manipulation of words in component rhythms, contrast, transition and suspense, the delay of ornament, the anticipation of the exactly situated dramatic trope, the development of image and observation to an inevitable end—the list of machines Blackmur said will make a poem cohere, move, and shine apart. (pp. 225-26)

[In A Little Geste], there are too many poems which forget or forego the second of two complementary propositions: that order is imposed on chaos and that chaos is the substance of order. Consequently Hoffman exhibits an even more eccentric delight than in An Armada of Thirty Whales … in an archaic and an arcane vocabulary, a mounting sense of the willful, the arbitrary, though I am reluctant to condemn an impulse with so many meaty links to poems behind and ahead of the poet. The perplexity, then, about the miscellany of "poems and blessings" starting off Hoffman's second book, published five years after his first, is a nomenclature which not so much reveals as reviles the poetical: "chaunt," "burgeoning" (five times), "avast," "benison," "targe," "pinion and fin," "behest," "time's demesne," "aquiver," "garbed," "unmeet," "effable" and "couth"…. It is not until the second part of this book, from which it takes its modest title A Little Geste, that we arrive at Hoffman's justification and perhaps his masterpiece. After reading the "Little Geste" itself, we can retrace the true perspective, the line of quickening wit, the series of poems in both these books which engage the most of life and refresh the terms of bewilderment, of wilderness: always it is the poems in which a ritual, cyclical, traditional version of service, in the hierological sense, is re-enacted…. A geste, of course, is a narrative, usually in assonant verse, about a real or a legendary hero. Much of Hoffman's story is in such verse, framed by various songs, chants, lays, ballads and carols. Here the curious old vocabulary works for our special wonder, and in the dreadful and dramatic rehearsal of Robin Hood not as the "democratic thief" to which he has shrunk "through fame's and history's reward," but as a version of the devoured cult-hero, a transubstantiated Osiris—indeed a pre-Christian fertility-god, dying at the height of his powers,…—Hoffman has put all his talents to their perfect and perfecting use. The array of archaic forms sustains the fable brilliantly: there is a terrible reality in the story. One recalls, even in the Howard Pyle versions of the legends foisted off on our modern childhood, the oddness of Robin Hood's downfall, bled to death by the pious prioress. Hoffman has taken this clue out of Robert Graves' hands and reconstructed the whole legend into an astonishingly condensed poem…. (pp. 228-30)

If "A Little Geste" enacts the passionate conflict between a primitive and instinctual life and the claims of civil order, it does so with a security of posture which Hoffman's work has not often elsewhere attained. I suppose this central triumph is in part due to the fact that he was working not only with information but with ideas—as Coleridge said one of his contemporaries had "no native passion because he was not a thinker."… Rarely, in his next collection published three years later, was Hoffman to reach, or even reach for, this kind of awful immediacy. But in it he added another strand to his braid, or brand to his strain, in a group of dream poems whose loosened diction and shifting imagery bring a further version of ritual, the nightmare repetition, into The City of Satisfactions. It is wonderful that this poet's resources of feeling are always stirred to intensest life by the fictive, the hieratic … and that his imagination of forms is fired most by the ritual, the legendary, the profoundly impersonal, while in most of his poems dealing with the private life untouched or untampered with by a cyclical resonance, we get the intended, willed effect, rather than an achieved art. But it is a wonderment we suffer gratefully, its rewards being so much weightier than its omissions; when we read,… with delighted astonishment for the accessible music of the thing, the truth of entrances and exits, of births and deaths rehearsed by a technical profundity equal to the fable of a total human inheritance, when we read such lyrics as "A New Birth," then, we know that as Hoffman says of Melville in his "academic" anthology of American Poetry and Poetics, "the imagery projects catastrophe across the spaces of heaven in the constellations, thence into mythology and back through time to the present. This is how Ariel renders the real." (pp. 231-32)