[In the following excerpt, Disch offers a negative assessment of Hay.]

I have for a long time been of the opinion that writing poetry, like good manners at dinner, should be a commonplace among any group of cultivated people, and is not a specifically “professional” accomplishment. There will always be those who excel at it, as there are those who are handsomer or dance with more panache. But the often aggrieved expectation that the creation of a body of poems entitles one to a stipend sufficient to subsist on and have free holidays at an artists' colony seems to me grasshopperism at its most presumptuous. Yet such has become an article of faith not only among poets of the middle rank, especially those who conduct writing workshops for a living, but also among the swelling ranks of bureaucrats who manage the foundations, colonies, and government offices devoted to the arts' own little welfare state within the larger one. For the price of just one jet bomber, these advocates insist, every poet in the country could be sent to Jamaica for a month of poetry bake-offs.

It may well be that there are some poets who would not fill even the slenderest of volumes without being funded by a trust fund or the federal Maecenas. I have one grasshopper friend who insists this is a universal truth and offers Sylvia Plath as an instance of the toll exacted on a poet's nobler nature by household chores. But there are persuasive counterexamples …

Among full-time professional poets at the apogee of their professional careers there is no one now in better odor than the Irish-American Paul Muldoon. All five of the back-cover blurbs on his ninth volume of poetry, Hay, hail him as “one of” if not outright the “most”—and then take your pick: accomplished (twice), inventive, ambitious, beautiful, or, simply, greatest (twice). Surely, Muldoon has an abundance of talent and has honed his craft to a fine edge. His poetry machine would seem to be always activated, so that in a sequence of ninety haiku (with rhyming first and third lines) he strikes off riffs of verse at virtually every footstep. Some are spot-on, some take unriddling, a few are opaque as concrete (“From the white-hot bales / Caravats and Shanavests / step with white-hot flails”). Yet for every closed door I am confident the author could supply a key, and on the whole Muldoon's haiku are quicksilver, with the brushwork of a Sargent watercolor. Much the same can be said for stretches of Muldoon's longer poems.

The question for such a poet is what task to adopt worthy of the machinery. Muldoon's chosen task has been the Wordsworthian Sublime with a twist of surrealism, a choice that implies that the poet's daily life, when mediated by his Muse, is the stuff theogonies are made of. His old girlfriends are the White Goddess, and his free associations vatic utterances. It follows from this that each of his poems becomes a kind of Holy Writ on which Muldoon himself may then write an entire Midrashic literature, the key to which is a perfect knowledge of Muldoon's taste in wine and pop music, his pets' peculiarities, all the books he's ever read, and the history of Ireland. The rhyme schemes of poems in one book reappear in later poems in reverent homage to the poet's ever vaster and more mellifluous oeuvre. He is a law unto himself.

From this description it must be evident that I am not among those, like Richard Tillinghast of the New York Times Book Review, who consider Muldoon “one of the two or three most accomplished rhymers now writing in English,” unless one quibbles over “rhymer” and narrows the field by ninety percent. I think Muldoon's solution to the problem that all abundantly gifted and fertile poets face at mid-career is not one calculated to enlarge the spirit any more than a set of exceptionally well-wrought crossword puzzles, and my own candidate for “one of the two or three most” etc. would be the no less abundant Albert Goldbarth, whose latest collection, Beyond, is, line by line, almost the antithesis of Hay.