Few poets have been as social … as W. B. Yeats; few have been as essentially solitary as Hayden Carruth. But like Yeats in his Tower, Carruth has for years rooted his poetry in the primary realism of place: in his case "a country laborer's / holding, fourteen acres 'more or less'" in the bottom of Foote Brook Gulf in northern Vermont. The difference in local altitude points to a major difference in attitude: Yeats, from the beginning, looked down on the changes that waved beneath him; his bitterness towered as he aged. Carruth is no less immune to anger, to the new "brutishness" which dooms farms and invades "the sacred identity" of individual lives. But Carruth's poems resist at ground level every invasion; they know the bitterness of a northern winter in their very bones, and their outlook is, by necessity rather than program, New England radical….

As any...