Reading Mr. Brautigan's [Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt], I'm struck by the fact that [he] cannot be aspiring to poetdom as it is commonly conceived these days.

Brautigan's poems suggest his presence as an imaginative, sensitive, and unexceptional observer. However, they neither explore his personality nor offer a reader anything else on a very deep or elaborate scale. The poetry is not tense, not particularly noble, not, seemingly, aspiring to anything other than the presentation of somebody's reactions, clarified and reduced into tasteful bites. A simpler way of saying this is that Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt should be gulped, like a session of Laugh In, that Mr. Brautigan is attempting to be an entertainer rather than a Great Figure in Literature, and that from anybody's point of view the attempt is worth having around. After all, his emphasis on entertainment is his distinction; attempts at presenting the thoughts of a plain man have been around since Catullus.

How, then, are we to be entertained? As entertainer Brautigan downplays himself and needs good jokes, which, short and strung together through the book, hit a response say, seven times out of ten. The material has a fresh touch, is clearly presented, and is delivered as a series of one-time tries. The effect he seems to be after is sensibility-tweaking. He presents a world which is comfortable, if pleasingly strange, and which will carry a reader along with very little effort. This makes him a good guest-room poet, if you like, but he does manage to tweak enough to make the show come off, one way or another. (And how much can be said of other poetry?) (p. 115)

Ideas, tough, involving ideas, are not Brautigan's speciality. He tends toward gestures and insights and words, but anyone who's been afraid of poetry because of its formality, glumness, bookish references, obscure, private visions, long words or politics can read this book. The man is not writing to poets or his educated peers; he may be writing instant culture, but he will be read. (p. 116)