[Cleverness] is not a vice, indeed I regard it as something of a virtue, and in John Hollander's poems it is the clearest sign of his extraordinary gift. Spectral Emanations, a book of "new and selected poems" which, read consecutively, takes us backward through Hollander's whole career, offers an abundance of examples. In a well-known early work, "Aristotle to Phyllis," Hollander translates the sounds (and some sense) of a Mallarmé poem into English, thus: "La chair est triste, hélas, et j'ai lu tous les livres" / "This chair I trusted, lass, and I looted the leaves"; "le vide papier que la blancheur défend" / "A wide papyrus … blanched and deafened"; "Steamer balancant ta mâture" / "Stammering, balanced, the master"; and "Lève l'ancre pour une exotique nature" / "dipped pale ink of an exotic nature"—this last item actually managing to pick up a pun (ancre/encre) which is lurking in the French….

Hollander imitates Marvell and Pope with uncanny precision, and actually makes his imitations work: those old masters are momentarily revived and contemplate the present with the ironic glances of their respective ages….

For an instance of [another] mode of wit, the leaning on a familiar phrase, we can't do better than look at Hollander's early poem about a divorced couple. "Quickly now," he asks, "which of you will keep the Lares, / Which the Penates?": "You have unmade your bed, now lie about it." This is a line which goes beyond cleverness, of course, as the imitations do, and suggests a considerable amount of sorrow and distress. (p. 27)

But of course even if cleverness is a virtue it does, quite often, keep bad company—or to change the metaphor, it belongs to a rather dubious family of qualities with names like diffusion, elusiveness, flippancy, and (my hand shakes as I tap out the word) insincerity. I don't mean that all good poetry has to be concentrated and confessional. I do mean that good poetry appears only when the poet is in touch with a set of genuine feelings, his own or someone else's or his culture's. A loose enough formula, but it is obviously possible for a poet not to be in touch in this way, and I think this is what happens quite frequently to Hollander: feelings are not available to him, or they flood the page, touch turns to rout…. [Certain passages from "Green" and "Departed Indigo"] seem to me merely stately: nothing is going on behind the perfect glare. It is not a question of artifice or manner … but of whether the language catches anything, or is simply idling. Compare the Popean "yowling chaos reassumes the streets," in "New York," which picks up energy and wit from its context, with Hollander's earlier "So frowning violence reassumes the crowded land," which is just vacant and grandiose.

Nothing there, then; when the flooding occurs, everything is there. In a witty poem about Sundays in New York, full of carefully emphasized locutions ("month of Sundays," "full of itself," "come to a bad end"), Hollander lets loose an unmanageable unhappiness, and tells us that on such Sundays "one" can go home, "one can have … climbed up a concrete hill to one's own walls / And quietly opened a vein." The wit and distance are swamped. It is a delicate notion, but it seems that the sincerity of the poem has been spoiled by the abrupt, excessive sincerity of the poet.

Hollander has diagnosed a good deal of this himself. His gift seems larger than his achievement; but his achievement, though sporadic, is substantial; and he has recently found a mode of writing in which the shady relatives of cleverness are paid off and put to work. The mode, in my view, is not the heavy myth which informs the most ambitious of the new poems in the new book, a legend about the lamp of the Second Temple, a seven-branched candelabrum, which Hollander associates with the seven colors of the spectrum, which in turn he plays through the hours from daylight to darkness. It is the mode of fragmentary, hinting narrative which Hollander used in his most recent book, Reflections on Espionage, a remarkably funny and quite haunting work. Here it appears in the central story about the Lamp, in the form of "Leaves from a Roman Journal" which tell a spectral, summary tale of love and adventure and loss and recovery. (pp. 27-8)

[Hollander] has found in the subdued, secretive world of such fictions a place for cleverness, indirection, insincerity, and himself. That he knows this is clearly indicated by a poem included in this new book and called "Collected Novels." Full of fine lines and gags ("terror firmer," "My Brother's Reaper"—the title of a novel), it shows a novelist who confesses that all the books he published under various names are in fact his. They are now "collected"; the title of one of them is a literal quotation from Hollander's earlier poem "The Ninth of July." It is a portrait of the poet in a mirror: Hollander is a number of quite different people, but he signs with a single name. (p. 28)