[There] is an almost total absence of human sympathy [in Tread the Dark], of concern for others' suffering. The poems are utterly solipsistic, outgrowths of a single, self-conscious, meditating sensibility…. (p. 469)

Over the years, Ignatow has worked to become a kind of poet of the people, in the tradition of Whitman and Williams. In order to carve out his own territory, Williams had to attack the elitism and intellectualism of Eliot—and a refreshing attack it was. Ignatow has a poem here directed against the elitist and Platonic concept of "perfect form" in poetry. He makes some telling points—unless you are an upright citizen, stolidly middle-class, white, prosperous, you do not belong in the poetry of perfect forms…. The great American writers have almost always been rebels and outcasts, shaggy, writing poems and novels in a clearly imperfect form.

I sympathize. But this is an elitist book that violates its author's own concerns; it forms an exclusive little world of one. The only citizen is David Ignatow, who carefully excludes even his readers. Poem after poem is preoccupied only with the imagined death of the author—he meditates on his potential suicide, on his decay, on his inevitable alienation and isolation. Humanity finds all doors into this book locked. The sufferings of others, their deaths in a loneliness and a pain we can easily imagine because we see them every day—these are as nothing to David Ignatow. It is impossible to empathize with the cold, self-absorbed solipsist who speaks these poems, despite the obvious skill with which they were written. (pp. 469-70)