John Hollander began his poetical career with A Crackling of Thorns (1958) which, on Auden's recommendation, was the choice of the Yale Younger Poets series. Superficially, his early poetry resembles Auden's in its wit, its learned allusiveness, its prosodic mastery. There is a poem, "Under Aquarius / for W. H. Auden on his 65th Birthday," in Tales Told of the Fathers which reminds us that Hollander knows his Auden…. Indeed, Hollander owes a great debt to Auden. The final sentence of the Preface to his brilliant critical work Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (1975) reads: "To the late W. H. Auden, whose ear for prosody was like a moral sense, my obligation is not easy to express in a sentence."

Yet, though the resonance of Hollander's poetry often reminds one of Auden, his vision is his own. He has paid his debt to the sassenach and is clearly an American poet…. [The Head of the Bed] is a remarkable long poetic sequence consisting of a prose prelude and fifteen cantos of five tercets each…. [The] poem, rich in implication, is … remarkably accessible to the fairly knowledgeable reader. (p. 356)