When "a bee for beauty boomed behind the grove" in Daryl Hine's first small book of poems, it might have been buzzing with the poet's own enthusiasm. Certainly Hine is the most elegant artificer among contemporary Canadian poets, yet most readers and critics find the beauty booms so loudly that they can detect little experience or meaning beyond. So Hine has remained in Canada, if not largely in his adopted United States, a poet treated with awe but with little interest.

Hine, the son of Robert Fraser and Elsie James Hine, was born in 1936 in New Westminster, British Columbia. His early life is remembered in In and Out (1975), a privately printed confessional novel in verse, as friendless and boring--until he discovered Latin. His most recent book, Academic Festival Overtures (1985), expands on this earlier autobiographical work, seeming to fuse the intimate detail of Proust's A la recherche du temps...