[Hemingway's collected poems, 88 Poems,] show the thin, hard stream of his contempt even more clearly than his prose. Among the people and things that he subjected to his nostrilwincing amonia were blank verse, "clean" sports, Martel cognac, highbrows, gabby Jews, clergymen, wedding gifts, gung-ho soldiers, Teddy Roosevelt, Democracy, expatriates, liberals….

And yet—it sounds unbelievable after this catalogue of peeve—Hemingway was an endearing writer as well as a courageous one. The strange word "endearing" comes to mind because he was so wholehearted in his motives: when he hated he hated, when he had contempt it was not disguised. Even though Hemingway was a dirty fighter with words, and probably in a brawl as well, there is never any doubt that they were wrenched out of him; in fact, you can say that the dirty fighting was symbolic of the lengths he would go to to avenge his obsessions. It gives us pause.

When a writer is so seriously bugged, hurt, paranoid, offended by what others brush off, it directs us more to the helpless intensity of his reactions than his targets. Put it this way: A case can be made that Hemingway was an almost maidenly virtuous man eroded by the world, and his distortions evoke the dual reactions of pity and admiration. Pity for what one feels is his compulsive, thin-skinned, reckless need for self-justification at any cost—bloodying people and their reputations—and admiration for the shape and form and voice that this driving curse took with him as it did for no contemporary.

But all of this, much as I believe it, is a couple of jiggers too heavy for the tone of most of these poems. At least half of them are playful, shrewd and telling as always, but in the middle register where Hemingway can use that perfect deadpan style of his…. (p. 52)

[The] power of Hemingway's early sketches and short stories derives very much, especially when looked at in hindsight, from the sharp clarity and concreteness that the Imagists brought to our poetry. To the best of my knowledge, Hemingway was the first great American prose writer to make use of the Imagists' legacy…. It was no accident that Ezra Pound, chief tub-thumper for the Imagists, touted the young Hem to Ford Madox Ford this way: "He writes very good verse and he's the finest prose stylist in the world."

Pound was a terrific enthusiast, of course, but even if you undercut what he says about Hemingway's poems—and the editor of this book sanely says it would be a "mistake" to overrate them—the connection with his prose is practically a sibling one. The poems show the same terseness, muscle, proud independence; but whereas the early sketches and stories were crafted with a cat burglar's control and pacing, the poems "were written quickly to satisfy some immediate purpose," as Gerogiannis tells us. It's interesting to note that a good 70 of these quickies were written before Hemingway was 30. After that, he petered out; and the last ones, except for a little couplet at the very end, reflect the growing garrulousness and self-pity that finally destroyed the man and rotted up the spartan prose as well….

Vintage Hemingway was never in the phony bombast. It was always in the lean, sudden right hand to the button. There are enough gorgeous shots in these after-hours poems to pull your mouth into wry Bogart smiles and make you slowly, sadly shake your hand. What a piece of work was this tormented jock of the American word. (p. 53)