[All] the while he has been steadily writing poetry, Wagoner has been publishing novels—eight of them, from The Man in the Middle (1954) through Tracker (1975). Having read only two, I can't expound on their relations with the poetry, but suspect that Wagoner's two vineyards have fertilized each other.

To be sure, the poems are beautifully clear: not merely comprehensible, but clear in the sense that their contents are quickly visible. Stepping into a Wagoner poem, you enter a well-lit room, or a glade; you see it vividly, and often you know at once who or what inhabits it…. [It] is not only in setting a scene (and peopling it) that Wagoner is skilled; nor in exploring the tensions of a dramatic situation; nor in seeing from more than one point of view. All those are skills we expect of a good novelist, and Wagoner possesses them. More important, however, he knows when to bring himself into a poem, naturally and without reticence, and when to keep out. Writing novels, after all, must instruct one in modesty and in tact. For novelists can't sit around letting the flux of the world filter through their sensibilities, the way poets can, or think they can, without boring everybody. The novelist has a situation to involve us in. And I find Wagoner's poems more involving than most people's: few of them fail to make you wish to finish reading them, once you begin.

In fact, Wagoner is so readable a poet that, coming to him after, say, an evening with Pound's later Cantos, one practically has a twinge of Puritan guilt, and feels shamelessly entertained—refreshed instead of exhausted. His poems have never invited much annotation, haven't offered thesis-writers much to explicate. Presumably, he would rather have readers. I gather that he doesn't mind being entertaining…. He reminds us that a poem, while it may well be a passionate outcry from the heart, inevitably has an element of theatricality. (pp. 133-34)

However new some of the themes in Wagoner's later work …, his poetry has undergone relatively few formal alterations. It wasn't necessary for Wagoner to make a break out of tight forms …, he hasn't ever been confined to them…. [Very] early in his career, Wagoner settled on a middling degree of formal pressure—choosing blank verse, or loose unrimed Alexandrines, relying on off-rimes, on a flexible Prufrock line of varying length. He is capable, of course, of being as traditionally formal as he likes…. [But] formality isn't usual for him. Throughout his work, Wagoner has never lost touch with meter; but it is a subtle undercurrent, and he rarely is obvious about it. (p. 135)

[The] mature Wagoner has often resorted to extended, whole-poem metaphors. The deservedly well-known "Staying Alive," very likely one of the best American poems of the 1960s, is not only a specific and practical guide to survival in the wilderness, but a memorable comment about surviving (temporarily) in this world. Following the method of woodsy allegory, Wagoner has lately written a whole group of such poems (the first section of the "New Poems" of 1976) [in his Collected Poems, 1956–1976]…. (p. 137)

Besides instructing us in survival, Wagoner keeps saying, "Don't cling to life too covetously."… That theme persists in poems such as "Staying Alive," "The Emergency Maker," and "Lost." He knows that every human life is a lost cause ("It's temporary"). Wagoner isn't a poet to climb on a wagonette to scream—I didn't come across a single mention of Viet Nam—and yet he is capable of impassioned sympathy…. (pp. 137-38)

Wagoner's unsolemn regard for serious matters comes out in his light views of traditional legends…. But Wagoner is continually surprising … a hunger in himself to be more serious. See "Trying to Pray," which I read (perhaps wrongly) as a rather wistful look at those lucky bastards dumb enough to believe in God. Wagoner seems to crave in the everyday trappings of contemporary America a vestige of myth to claim…. In his latest poems, those based on Indian legends (whether traditional or invented), perhaps Wagoner goes beyond just examining myth, but is now perceiving myth from the inside. Some of the best of these new poems center on a character called Stump; in their literate primitivism, the poems recall Ted Hughes's "Crow," and easily rival it.

What is clear is that Wagoner hasn't just stayed alive, but has kept growing. (pp. 139-40)