The style of W. D. Snodgrass is not consistent enough to be readily categrorized, and I am at a loss to account for his title, In Radical Pursuit. In a few essays, but not many, Snodgrass may be the pupil of, say, Ernest Jones. (p. xc)

In Radical Pursuit begins with "Four Personal Lectures" about contemporary poetry in general, and large parts of them concern the development of Snodgrass's own work…. Rightly defined, irony, in Brooks & Company's extended use of the term, is markedly similar to what Snodgrass praises as tact, in his essay "Tact and the Poet's Force." (pp. xci-xcii)

Six of the other essays in this collection plod their way through Roethke, Ransom …, Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner," A Midsummer Night's Dream, Don Quixote, and the Inferno. I except the pieces on Crime and Punishment and on the gods in the Iliad, both of which quickened my interest and left me enlightened. Psychoanalytic criticism can be exasperating, applied to a work that is clear without it. But Crime and Punishment is a novel of perplexing motives and mysterious dreams; and Snodgrass, whose knowledge of Freudianism seems impressive at least to a reader with little of it, illuminates many of Dostoevsky's dark corners….

These examples illustrate the miscellaneous nature of In Radical Pursuit. Literary criticism apparently is something for Snodgrass to dip into occasionally. (p. xcii)