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 CLC, Vols. 3, 5, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)

David Wagoner's poems have a self-assured rhetorical ease. He is an outstanding craftsman, a master of free verse. In Wagoner's [Sleeping in the Woods] there is a fresh and original sense of stanza, line length and sentence structure. Yet his style is neither opaque nor obtrusive. There is a beautiful precision to the poet's language, especially in his descriptions of motion….