I

In the last decade and a half, a new movement in American poetry, which we choose to call the emotive imagination, has gained sufficient momentum and import to justify definition and analysis. William Stafford, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and Robert Bly are its central figures.¹ Their work represents a new departure from a poetry that since World War II has wrestled with the antipodal schools of the academic and the beat, both outgrowths of an affluent society. It is indebted neither to these schools nor to those which dominated American poetry between the wars; it is, in a word, meaningfully new.

Briefly but intelligently in his perceptive introduction to Contemporary American Poetry, Donald Hall calls attention to this direction in which he sees working a colloquial vocabulary, a simple language, and a “profound subjectivity.” Hall understands that this newness is based on the way in which the imagination is used: “This new imagination reveals through images a subjective life which is general, and which corresponds to an old objective life of shared experience and knowledge.” But Hall is not willing to make the commitment that this poetry is either a school or a clique; he prefers to call it “a way of seeing and a way of feeling.”

The validity of Hall's observations has been questioned by Cleanth Brooks in The Southern Review.² Brooks, who oversimplifies, explains the technique of this new usage of imagination thus: “The poet does no more than put one substance beside the other and leave the combustion to occur, or not to occur, in the reader's imagination.” For Brooks the combustion does not occur. If what Hall claims concerning the relationship of the subjective life to “an objective life of shared experience and knowledge” is true, he continues, then the “prospect is exciting” in terms of reestablishing “a rapport with nature” and of restoring “the community of values, the loss of which wasted the land.” But Brooks concludes: “I remain skeptical.” Even so, excitement is being generated by the newness Brooks so abruptly dismisses. His reaction only underscores the real need for critical readjustment to the unique qualities of the emotive imagination at work. This need is given expression in “Postscript,” the closing poem of Stafford's West of Your City:

You reading this page, this trial—
shall we portion out the fault?
You call with your eyes for fodder,
demand bright frosting on your bread,
want the secret handclasp of jokes,
the nudges of innuendo.
And we both like ranting, swearing,
maybe calling of names:
can we meet this side of anger
somewhere in the band of mild sorrow?—
though many of our tastes have vanished,
and we depend on spice?—
Not you, not I—but something—
pales out in this trying for too much
and has brought us, wrong, together.
It is long since we've been lonely
and my track looking for Crusoe
could make you look up, calling, “Friday!”

All of us would like to look up and call “Friday.” Now, finally, we can.

The poetry of the emotive imagination does not lend itself easily to the New Critical method of intricate analysis, in which paradox, irony, and multiple layers of ambiguity are valued, at times, as ends in themselves. The emotive imagination leads the reader to understanding through feeling rather than through chartered and structured intellectuality. Its basic techniques are timing, leaps, and muted shock, all of which work together, so that the reader, if he is not what John Ciardi calls “unbuzzable,” experiences the imaginative interplay between subject and attitude; he feels and is rewarded.

In order to draw the reader into the mind of the poem, exact timing is a necessity. This is all the more imperative in poems of this movement since the diction is restrained (anti-rhetorical), the rhythms calm and colloquial, and the subject matter generally nonviolent. Many of Simpson's short poems, such as “In the Suburbs,” “Birch,” and “American Poetry,” are timed with an uncanny sense of precision. However, it is in Stafford's “Fall Wind” that timing finds no equal in the emotive imagination:

Pods of summer crowd around the door;
I take them in the autumn of my hands.
Last night I heard the first cold wind outside;
the wind blew soft, and yet I shiver twice:
Once for thin walls, once for the sound of time.

Here also is the intense subjectivity so frequently marking this new imagination.

The leap at the end of “Fall Wind” and the leaps in the poems of the movement in general are structured emotionally, not rationally. Calmly presented, the statement of shock through which the irrational leaps are made demands from the reader something similar to what Coleridge meant by “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.” Take, for example, Stafford's “Late at Night,” in which the speaker talks of listening to “the hailstone yelps of geese” one night. He then puts a question to the reader, after which the leap occurs and the muted shock is achieved:

Were they lost up there in the night?
They always knew the way, we thought.
You looked at me across the room:—
We live in a terrible season.

The first fifteen lines of Wright's “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” describe in particular detail what the poet is observing, things such as a bronze butterfly, flowers, and a chicken hawk. Without a step by step progression, the leap occurs which both intensely personalizes the poem and exemplifies the emotive imagination at work: “I have wasted my life.” And Bly's “Sunday in Glastonbury” clicks through muted shock:

It is out in the flimsy suburbs,
Where the light seems to shine through the walls.
My black shoes stand on the floor
Like two open graves.
The curtains do not know what to hope for,
But they are obedient.
How strange to think of India!
Wealth is nothing but lack of people.

In the better poems of this movement, the reader is confronted with the unexpected, but yet inevitable. And herein lies much of his pleasure. This is the case in Simpson's “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain.” An indictment of an America that has failed to fulfill its promise, the poem ends with this remarkable stanza:

The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras,
The bay mists clearing.
And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,
Dances like Italy, imagining red.

Compare this poem with Wright's “The Blessing,” in which the speaker (probably Wright himself—these poets are not addicted to employing personae) and a friend cross over a barbed wire fence into a pasture, where “the eyes of two Indian ponies / Darken with kindness.” After a rapport is established between the speaker and one of the ponies, “The Blessing” concludes:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Wright communicates here by what, on the surface, appears to be unreasonable and slightly, if not completely, absurd. But his timing is perfect and the richness of the image lies in its emotional suggestions. The reader is shocked by the irrationality of the image, yet he is not offended; he is enriched, as the speaker has been, by the experience.

II

It is necessary to call attention to the excesses to which poetry of the emotive imagination is subject. There are instances in which the leaps cannot be justified on an emotional basis. Occasionally, the juxtaposition of images at the end of the poem is too dissociated in the light of what precedes it, with the subsequent result that understanding through feeling is simply lost. Bly's “September Night with an Old Horse” is an instance in point:

I

Tonight I rode through the cornfield in the moonlight!
The dying grass is still, waiting for winter,
And the dark weeds are waiting, as if under water …

II

In Arabia, the horses live in the tents,
Near dark gold, and water, and tombs.

III

How beautiful to walk out at midnight in the moonlight
Dreaming of animals.

Apart from understanding through feeling, the poetic ends of Stafford, Wright, Simpson, and Bly vary, a matter to be taken up later; nonetheless, there is a technical similarity which occurs with differing degrees of consistency throughout their works. With Wright and Simpson, the use of the emotive imagination and of a technique peculiar to this movement appears with increasing regularity in their later poems; Stafford and Bly are consistent in these uses.

One of the most significant tendencies in this poetry is a conscious attempt to be colloquial and matter of fact. There is no rhetorical extravagance, no preciosity, and no substitution of matter for mind. Quotations cited throughout this essay testify to the quality of naturalness in the language of these four poets. Their poetry is often one of statement, not in the didactic sense, but in the direction of the straightforward. Statement is nicely balanced by a fresh use of personifications which are generally metaphoric in nature. In these the reader is given a new perspective on the natural world; he is forced to bend to the movement of the poem, and he may experience slight jolts of adjustment. All of these help to prepare him emotionally for the new use of imagination evidenced so frequently at the end of the poem, for making the leaps and receiving the muted shock. Wright's “Beginning” provides a fine example of this method:

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breath
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

Most of Wright's personifications are drawn from the rural: “Silos creep away toward the West”; and “The wind tiptoes between poplars. / The silver maple leaves squint / Toward the ground.” Similarly, Bly draws subjects indigenous to the farm: “The corn is wandering in dark corridors”; “And hear the leaves scrape their feet on the wind”; “The soybeans are breathing on all sides.” However, in a poem like “Thinking of Wallace Stevens on the First Snowy Day in December,” Bly employs an extended metaphorical personification:

This new snow seems to speak of virgins
With frail clothes made of gold,
Just as the old snow shall whisper
Of concierges in France.
The new dawn sings of beaches
Dazzling as sugar and clean as the clouds of Greece,
Just as the exhausted dusk shall sing
Of the waves on the western shore.
This new strength whispers of the darkness of death,
Of the frail skiff lost in a giant cave,
Just as in the boat nearing death you sang
Of feathers and white snow.

Although of the four poets Simpson seems least attracted to the personification method, his use of it is extremely effective. Take the following examples: “The barns like scarlet lungs are breathing in / Pneumonia”; “But all night long my window / sheds tears of light”; or “love is like the sighing of the sand.”

It is, however, with Stafford that this method finds its most frequent and richest expression. Perhaps, at first, a categorical listing of some of Stafford's self-contained personifications is in order: “and a lost road went climbing the slope like a ladder”; “Pioneers, for whom history was walking through dead grass”; “the wheat fields crouched”; “The sun stalks among these peaks to sight / the lake down aisles”; “and willows do tricks to find an exact place in the wind”; and “And all night those oil well engines / went talking into the dark.”

Stafford also uses this method to good effect in larger units within the poem, such as in “Found in a Storm” and “The Peters Family,” from which respectively the following two quotations come:

A storm that needed a mountain
met it where we were:
we woke up in a gale
that was reasoning with our tent,
and all the persuaded snow
streaked along, guessing the ground.
miles told the sunset that Kansas
would hardly ever end,
and that beyond the Cimarron crossing
and after the row-crop land
a lake would surprise the country
and sag with a million birds.

Despite the compelling similarities that exist between these four poets, it would be wrong to lump them together explicitly in terms of technique just for the sake of defining a movement in American poetry. Although they most certainly are colloquial, use the statement and personification methods, and, most importantly, actively work the emotive imagination, they do not employ form with exacting similitudes. For example, Stafford has a tough inner discipline, a lean, hard masculinity. Bly, on the other hand, is much looser; he does not have the “austere rhythmic control” Peter Viereck ascribes to Stafford. Bly and Wright (in his later poems) pay less attention to externally imposed stanzaic and line length regulations than do Stafford and Simpson. Just as these poets differ in this respect, so do they differ, in varying degrees, in the subjects about which they write and in their resulting motifs and attitudes.

III

The power of the emotive imagination rests with its capacity to transform subjects of lyric simplicity into a personal and subjective recoil of emotion. The result in most of these poems is a re-emergence of romanticism, but of a differing and refreshing kind. Stafford, Wright, Simpson, and Bly are alike in their utter honesty of expression; the privacy of the human spirit is opened up as a declaration of song. These poets openly profess allegiance, not to the intellectual puzzles of verse, but to those forces that are personally experienced in emotion. They say to their predecessors: why have you withheld from your readers the honesty and frankness of indiscriminate joy, wonder, and beauty, and their counterparts?

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.

This is not to say that these poets give themselves over to lyricism with utter release, as Wright plainly implies by the reference to “dark thorns” in “Trying to Pray.” It is rather in their qualified affirmations that these writers are distinguished, and herein lies the newness of their romanticism. Their vision is untouched with false sentimentality or glassy illusion. It is noticeably free of the exotic, the escapist, or the allusionary. There is a hardness in their poetry that breathes the agony of world war as well as the corruption of the American Dream. What they propose as a source of reliability is a resilient and tough individualism that seeks out human compassion for its only consolation and stay.

Consider, for example, their attitudes toward their native land. These poets celebrate America with the eloquence and affection of Whitman, but not with his abandon. They have, to a large degree, rediscovered their land for American poetry; a surprising number of their poems are studded with place names of the American landscape. Of the four, Louis Simpson, a naturalized American, sees his country with the widest vision, and his is a view unimpaired by chauvinistic illusion. Consider his “Lines Written Near San Francisco”:

Whitman was wrong about the People,
But right about himself. The land is within.
At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.

For all his disenchantment, he still maintains in “Orpheus in America” that “The melancholy of the possible / Unmeasures me.” It is that “possible” Stafford clings to in “Bi-Focal”:

Sometimes up out of this land
a legend begins to move.
Is it a coming near
or something under love?

Bly is ostensibly lyrical and much of his work exhibits a temperament of moodiness, a whimsicality spilling over into his love for America. Bly's awareness of the America-motif in recent poetry is attested to by his editorship of an anthology for his Sixties Press, Forty Poems Touching on Recent American History. In “Driving Through Ohio,” he openly affirms:

I am full of love, and love this torpid land.
Some day I will go back, and inhabit again
The sleepy ground where Harding was born.

The same hardcore frankness, joined with fierce affection, Wright declares in his poem, “Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas 1960”: “And I am lost in the beautiful white ruins / Of America.”

The affinity of these poets rests emphatically not with the forces of Wall Street and the moneyed lords of America. Their antagonism toward the representatives of capitalism, who they feel have perverted the dream America promised, is universal and, at times, vindictive. Even Stafford, who has the smallest axe to grind, finds cause to lament a civilization given over to mechanization and profit seekers. The grudge he and these poets carry is not against private individuals, but against those men who seek generally to cancel out the sacredness of the private personality and who have lost it themselves. Stafford so attests this in “A Visit Home”:

For calculation has exploded—
boom, war, oilwells, and, God!
the slow town-men eyes and blue-serge luck.

It is probably in this theme of disgust that these poets succumb most easily to excess. Simpson's “The Inner Part” concludes with a blanket condemnation of postwar America:

Priests, examining the entrails of birds,
Found the heart misplaced, and seeds
As black as death, emitting a strange odor.

It remains, nevertheless, that disgust is as much a component of honesty as joy. And joy is the dominant tone of Simpson's response to America. Asked in a recent interview if becoming an American had advanced his poetry, Simpson replied:

Oh yes. It may be that the things I say about America are foolish to one who was born here, but I'm fascinated with America. There are all sorts of things that haven't been written about. That's what's so exciting to me. I would like to write a poem that would make you say, “Boy, that's the first time anyone ever described a gas station!” I was writing it, but it didn't work out; another poem worked out instead. I was talking about a filling station at night when a whole town is closed down, and I wrote: “The lights of the filling station were quivering with emotion.” Now, that's what they were doing. All the other lights were out as you arrive in this strange town, and you see the white lights, the gas pump lights, quivering with emotion.³

These new voices in American poetry discover their kindred spirits with those Americans who are denied the ease of affluence. Wright's litany of preferences is catalogued in “On Minding One's Own Business”:

From prudes and muddying fools,
Kind Aphrodite, spare
All hunted criminals,
Hoboes and whip-poor-wills,
And girls with rumpled hair,
All, all of whom might hide
Within that darkening shack.
Lovers may live, and abide.

Bly echoes: “It is good also to be poor,” and Simpson: “I have the poor man's nerve-tic, irony.”

The frontier theme, long a dominant note in American literature, is picked up with renewed attention in this recent poetry. Both Stafford and Simpson now live on the West coast; Bly and Wright have strong Midwestern roots, and, in addition, a number of Stafford's poems treat the Midwest prairie of his youth. In reading through this poetry, one is struck by the insistency upon an enduring American integrity, never at hand, but always westward. Stafford's “The Move to California” recalls the source of his motivation in making the move: “the angel went by in the dark, / but left a summons: Try farther west.” That same angel reappears at the end of Simpson's “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain” as the “angel in the gate” at San Francisco. The frontier remains ultimately personal and human; the territory is exhausted as it reaches on to the Pacific. Wright's “Stages on a Journey Westward” voices this frustration:

America,
Plunged into the dark furrows
Of the sea again.

Simpson, too, experiences regret as he stands on the shores in “Lines Written Near San Francisco”:

Out there on the Pacific
There's no America but the Marines.

These poets celebrate the West with a fondness recalling that held by Robert Frost for his New England. The debt to Frost is perhaps inevitable in this poetry, and one notices, especially in Stafford, the parallels—even though Stafford goes beyond Frost in his use of imaginative interplays. “Something sent me out in these desert places” from “By the Snake River” is surely rooted in Frost's own “Desert Places,” and Frost's theme of returning to one's sources in “Directive” is sounded in Stafford's “Watching the Jet Planes Dive”:

We must go back and find a trail on the ground
back of the forest and mountains on the slow land; …
We must find something forgotten by everyone alive.

The word “wild” recurs with consistency throughout Stafford's poems. It is not that he despises tamed civilization or that he yearns for uninhibited primitivism; rather, his “wild” is what is natural, authentic, and untouched by the artificial. This is what Stafford sees as a salvation. He can envisage “a lost Cree” returning to set foot on “some new shore” to be a new chief. Yet the proposals of this wilderness are spiritual: “Our moccasins do not mark the ground.” This concluding line from “Returned to Say” evokes the jolt of the emotive imagination as a salutation to his faith in the frontier spirit.

The regionalism drawn upon in all these poems is never for its own sake. The focus of interest always resides within the poet's private and subjective responses. One is not surprised at the strong influence of family in these poems. With great simplicity, Simpson's “My Father in the Night Commanding No” reveals the complexity of his relationship with his father:

My father in the night commanding No
Has work to do. Smoke issues from his lips;
                    He reads in silence.
The frogs are croaking and the streetlamps glow.

The same distance of feeling toward his father is exposed by Wright in “The Revelation” where he muses “over time and space” upon his sternness, “the damning of his eye,” and which ends with this moving reconciliation:

And weeping in the nakedness
Of moonlight and of agony,
His blue eyes lost their barrenness
And bore a blossom out to me.
And as I ran to give it back,
The apple branches, dripping black,
Trembled across the lunar air
And dropped white petals on his hair.

Of these poets it is Stafford who is most haunted by memories of his father. He can evoke the comic imagination of his father in “Mouse Night: One of Our Games,” his unique eccentricity in “Parentage,” or his intuitive love for nature in “Listening.” But it is the firm bond of affection for his father that Stafford sings unabashedly, without fear of sophisticates or Freudians: “My father and I stood together while the storm went by.”

The ranges of Wright's subject matter are expansive and varied. The dead rise up in his poems to impinge upon his imagination; weaving in and out of his poems are figures from his past who continue to cross over into his sensibility. There is no morbidity here; there is an honest acquiescence in the enduring hold of dominant personalities. Victims of drownings make up a repetitive cast in Wright's poetry; condemned prisoners are his heroes. One notes, too, Wright's late successes centering around his fondness for horses. Love poems appear in quantity in all his volumes; even though they do not omit the sensual, he treats these subjects with delicacy and restraint. Describing a love affair in the autumn landscape in “Eleutheria,” he selects the surrounding details with the richness of the emotive imagination:

And far away I heard a window close,
A haying wagon heave and catch its wheels,
Some water slide and stumble and be still.
The dark began to climb the empty hill.

Stafford, Wright, Simpson, and Bly, whether describing the panorama of America or the privacy of family, relate a world vitally alive with a spirit of evanescence and the wonder of childhood. But the exaltations of these poets must be weighted by their disenchantment, and such a coexistence is a new phenomenon in American romanticism. They remain a displaced generation alienated in a land they love immensely.

IV

In the last analysis, one further point remains to be weighed in relation to these poets. It is true that they are boldly fusing leaps of the imagination with a direct projection of emotion, making up what we consider to be a new and original poetic technique. Their poetry is incidental and subjective without being trivial and illusionary. They have established their own tradition of hard-nosed romanticism. One comes eventually to ask what these poets, for all their novelty, have to tell us about living our lives in the second half of the twentieth century, about fronting the pressing political, social, and religious doubts that underlie that age. In short, one asks about the “teaching” half of Horace's prescription that a poet should teach as well as delight, or, in another way, to ask about their participation in what Matthew Arnold called “high seriousness.”

These poets, it is obvious, are not standing on soap boxes; theirs is not a poetry of doctrine or of bombast. On the question of religious faith, the four are not homogeneous. Bly's poetry approaches a tone of bitterness in his impatience with all religious faith. In the poem, “At the Funeral of Great Aunt Mary,” for example, he responds to the promise of resurrection with “Impossible. No one believes it.” The acrimony of Bly gives way to a kind of frustration in Simpson in so far as the religion of churches is concerned. In “There Is” he confesses a futile search:

I seek the word. The word is not forthcoming.
O syllables of light … O dark cathedral. …

Almost as a direct rejoinder to this, Stafford affirms in “The Tillamook Burn,” “You can read His word down to the rock.” Stafford, of the four, is the most obviously rooted in Christian faith. There is an effusive tone of religion in all his poems, in his reverential love of nature and family as well as in his more direct statements of religious faith:

We weren't left religion exactly (the church
was ecumenical bricks), but a certain tall element:
a pulse beat still in the stilled rock
and in the buried sound along the buried mouth of the creek.

This “pulse beat” recognition of God (the above lines are from “Tornado”) is Stafford's source of religious faith. Wright's poem, “The Angel,” is clearly sympathetic to the crucified Christ, and he has written several poems from the point of view of Judas, always treating the betrayer of Christ with pity and sympathetic affection.

Without doubt, a strong theme in this poetry is a quiet and calm stoicism in the face of an earth they find predestined to self-destruction, and a heaven they can see only vaguely, if at all. They hold out almost with desperation a plea for human compassion. “We want real friends or none; / what's genuine will accompany every man,” says Stafford in “The Only Card I Got on My Birthday Was From an Insurance Man.” Stafford's technique frequently is to juxtapose two situations which are essentially in conflict; there is no outward moralizing, but the cleavage between the two situations becomes experienced by the reader himself as an emotional shock. “Traveling through the Dark” is the most obvious example, confronting the moral innocence of nature with the amoral mechanism of society. A doe, victim of a recent killing and warm only with the impossible life of her unborn fawn, is pushed over the bank by the poet as he stands beside his purring engine, fully and painfully aware of the irony inherent in his shameful commitment to this society. “Vacation,” an earlier poem, employs a similar technique:

One scene as I bow to pour her coffee:—
                    Three Indians in the scouring drouth
                    huddle at a grave scooped in the gravel,
                    lean to the wind as our train goes by.
                    Someone is gone.
                    There is dust on everything in Nevada.
I pour the cream.

A similar note of human pathos which results from social indifference and isolation reappears in many poems of this movement. Stafford is strong in his demands for involvement in the concerns of the human: “the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe— / should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.” Simpson, Wright, and Bly echo these demands in their own individual styles. In “Frogs,” Simpson, listening to the croaking of the animals, finds their sound “monstrous” but “filled with satisfaction”: “In the country I long for conversation— / Our happy croaking.” The threads of human compassion are evident in almost any of Wright's poems. It is clear from his poetry that personal tragedies have laid a heavy hand upon him, leading not to self pity, but to an outward concern for all the afflicted whom he encounters. “Mutterings over the Crib of a Deaf Child” is such an example, from which this is taken:

He will learn pain. And, as for the bird,
It is always darkening when that comes out.
I will putter as though I had not heard,
And lift him into my arms and sing
Whether he hears my song or not.

The peace and security of human companionship is voiced by Bly, too, in “Late At Night During A Visit of Friends” when he exclaims: “The human face shines as it speaks of things / Near itself.”

What the influence and final direction of the emotive imagination will be we do not venture to say. Certainly one of its major attributes is its accessibility to a widespread reading audience by means of its simplicity and calm lyricism. This in itself is cause for rejoicing in modern American poetry. Like all serious movements in poetry, it is not content with surface judgments: “Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be,” says Stafford in “Vocation.” This perennial discovery is in a poetry which is to be felt as well as to be understood. Indeed, the whole process of the emotive imagination demands that comprehension is dependent upon emotion and that the “truth” of poetry goes beyond the rational. These poets, singing their country, their region, their family, themselves, are reasserting a romanticism in their works; it is a stance that posits no falsity or escapism. The emotive imagination, for all its leaping flights, is rooted in the hard realities of the present.

Stafford, Wright, Simpson, and Bly are not the only poets today who are taking new liberties with the ranges of the imagination; they do make up a representative collection of the emotive imagination at work in American poetry. We are convinced that the work of these men has already affected the direction of American poetry in the last decade and promises to enlarge its influence.

Notes

1. Poems reproduced in whole or in part in this essay are included in the following volumes: Robert Bly, Silence in the Snowy Fields. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1962. Contemporary American Poetry, selected and introduced by Donald Hall. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962. Louis Simpson, A Dream of Governors. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. Louis Simpson, At the End of the Open Road. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1963. Louis Simpson, Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. William Stafford, West of Your City, Los Gatos, California: The Talisman Press, 1960. William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark, New York: Harper & Row, 1962. William Stafford, The Rescued Year. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. James Wright,The Green Wall. New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 1957. James Wright, Saint Judas. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1963.

2. See “Poetry Since The Waste Land,” I, n.s. (Summer, 1965), 498-500.

3. “An Interview with Louis Simpson, Part II,” Dust (Winter, 1965), p. 17.