Richard Eberhart, from the beginning of his career, has often displayed that intense insight into reality which characterizes the poet whose gift is close to Blakean vision. This sort of insight works most frequently from a base of sharply apprehended reality, to rise toward levels where the fact at once dissolves and condenses into meaning. Eberhart's poem "The Groundhog" illustrates this power of transformation and transcendence very clearly indeed; and many of the poems of his early and middle period, including the extraordinary "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," advance step by step from the observed fact to the resolving universal intimation.

And Eberhart, an assiduous writer, has been steadily engaged in experiments with form, over the years. He has been experimental within form—that is, he has worked inside poetry's conventional rules, modifying them within boundaries, instead of denying all formal precedent (as is the habit of many modern writers). This latter procedure can end only in monotony, since so many effects are passed over—effects truly fitted for the condensation of language and the production of "memorable speech." Eberhart's work has never become repetitive, although, of course, certain of his experiments, in the nature of things, have been less interesting than others. In ["Am I My Neighbor's Keeper?"] he has experimented with the sonnet form. (p. 143)

Eberhart has written "Am I My Neighbor's Keeper?" in a species of "sprung rhythm." And he has varied the number of stresses in the lines, as well as keeping the syllable count irregular…. Eberhart's sense of one sonnet convention (the dramatic importance of the fourteenth and last line) comes into view, when he writes the fourteenth line in perfectly scannable iambic feet—five of them.

There is the constant likelihood that the final effect of a series of "sprung rhythm" lines will result, not in strength mounting on strength, but in weakness compounding weakness. Here, hair's breadth chances taken are irrevocable; the stumble remains a stumble. Eberhart does not wholly escape these dangers. His first four lines are largely wasted; the totally unmetrical variation on the line of Keats seems rather misjudged, and no line of direction is indicated. One tenet of sonnet-writing is illustrated here: no line, no stress, no word, no pause, can be wasted. It is an exigent form. There is no room in it to falter and halt.

From line 5 on, the Eberhart poem finds itself and moves on. It moves on not only metrically but in strength of concrete image. The first four lines are ineffectively abstract. The actual words used are extremely vague; and no images appear, to advance or clinch the meaning. With line 5 the poem begins to be enriched by the symbol, and by those condensing devices that give the part for the whole, and bind the general into the particular. At the beginning of the sestet, we are introduced, at last, to the strikingly particular: to actual description of a unique event. The poem goes over into a short narrative passage of six lines. The use of detail brings the poem into focus; and added "meaning," now of an effective abstract kind, comes into existence in the poem's final line. (pp. 145-46)

Eberhart has made an interesting try at introducing the anecdote to reinforce and illustrate a moment of philosophic speculation. That the poem finally feels itself a sonnet, its final movement toward the direct, the dramatic, the heightened (and heightening) convention, proves. After the first Keatsian line, it is more or less committed to the sonnet direction. But a good deal of time is wasted in search. (p. 146)