It is exactly 20 years since the appearance of John Hollander's first book of poems. I read the book then, soon after I first met the poet, and was rather more impressed by the man than by the book. It has taken 20 years for the emotional complexity, spiritual anguish, and intellectual and moral power of the man to become the book. The enormous mastery of verse was there from the start, and is there still, so augmented that only James Merrill in his own generation seems to me Hollander's peer as an artist, as a stylist equal to Auden and to Wilbur. But there seemed almost always to be more knowledge and insight within Hollander than the verse could accommodate. (p. 42)

As a poet, Hollander was not truly Hollander until the volume, The Night Mirror, published in 1971, when he was past meridian. [Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems] is strongest in his work of the 1970s, in the sequence or long poem "The Head of the Bed," in the title sequence of "Tales Told of the Fathers," and in "Spectral Emanations," the superb and difficult long poem that should make a new beginning for him.

Hollander began as an Audenesque poet of the 1950s, merging the American Auden back into the Jonsonian line of measured wisdom. But from The Night Mirror on, Hollander surprisingly blends Jonson and Shelley in a single body, with Stevens inevitably displacing Auden as central precursor. Quite explicitly, Hollander has developed into an American-Jewish High Romantic, esoteric and elegiac, and daring to write long poems in the Sublime mode…. "The Head of the Bed" concealed something of its complexities and its profound design beneath a graceful mythological pattern, baroque in its interwindings. "Spectral Emanations" brings its difficult vision directly to the reader, demanding extraordinary energy of response, and a genuine labor of reading. With this poem, Hollander adds another to the formidable group of major achievements by poets of his generation. "Spectral Emanations," in scope and splendor, is comparable to Merrill's "The Book of Ephraim," Ashbery's "Fragment," and Ammons's "Hibernaculum" and "Sphere." But it is the most recondite and elaborate of these poems, and indeed is as difficult as the Stevens of "The Auroras of Autumn." It demands rereadings, and greatly rewards them.

At once an American and a Jewish fable, the poem moves out from a suggestion in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, for a seven-branched allegory celebrating the recovery of the golden lamp that Titus robbed from the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Hollander restitutes for the lost sacred illumination by seven color-visions, each supported by a prose-poem as commentary. The 40 pages of verse and prose constitute a brief epic marked by bitter wit, by an impressive awareness of the painful burdens of literary representation this late in tradition, and by an authentic and very surprising communal passion, which hesitates upon the verge of allowing itself expression in the accents of the Jewish religion. At least two of the sections, "Yellow" and "Violet," seem to me individually great poems, but it is the total coherence of the entire sequence, its difficult rightness, that is most admirable and that promises to make this work canonical. (pp. 42-3)

Hollander is a restless and very varied poet, and many readers prefer him as a satirist, or as a comic writer, or in poems of ironic self-reflection. This selected volume gives much of its space to those modes, as well as to shaped poems and to philosophical meditations…. The poems that I urge upon new readers, besides "Spectral Emanations" and "The Head of the Bed," would include "On the Calendar," "Tales Told of the Fathers," "Mount Blank," "The Night Mirror," "Under Cancer," the versions of the Yiddish poet Halpern, "Ad Musam," and "From the Ramble." But there are many more nearly as good, and my sensibility is narrower than Hollander's. What this volume brings us is another poet as vital and accomplished as Ammons, Merrill, Merwin, Ashbery, James Wright, an immense augmentation to what is clearly a group of major poets…. (p. 43)