[The Cost of Seriousness] is important in what it attempts, and important for Porter, I should imagine—not just because of the more intimate and painful area of experience on which many poems draw, but because he has cut out so much of the clutter of cleverness which lumbered previous volumes.

The cost of seriousness is not, as Porter writes in his title poem, 'death', but emotional pain; and the pain in these poems extends beyond the poems directly mourning his wife, and reaches into the process of making art. Porter feels with force 'The Lying Art':

                        … Real pain
       it aims for, but can only make gestures,
       the waste of selling-short, the 'glittering'….

Art cannot reach the reality of pain. What does this leave Porter with, as artist? A combination of indirectness and statement: poems formally set, often offering open discourse or arguments with himself, which employ intimacies of tone, record intimate details, move through areas of privacy, all of this covered by both tact and the acknowledgement that this is not the whole truth.

The result, I find, is that the poems are at the mercy of the emotional state the reader brings to them. In different readings I have found them unbearably painful and been left cold by them. This, clearly, can happen with any poem: but trying again and again to reach these, I must conclude that Porter's attempted resolution has not worked. The problem is one of distance and control…. Porter does disrupt the surface of his art, but even when he does so, too much distance is retained…. (p. 68)

In one poem in this collection, 'The Delegate', Porter takes a minimum of distance, making the poem a direct address by the deceased. With this slackening of art's hold, the poem's acute understanding of the process of remembering the dead is allowed its freedom to move us. I make these comments on Porter, particularly aware that, in words I take from [Anthony] Hecht, they are 'provisionally true / As anything else one cares to think about.' (p. 69)