Alfred Corn blends the innovative and the traditional in his poetry and has a style and tone that are unmistakable; yet, unlike other poets with highly original voices, he gives no impression of being a loner or isolated pioneer. Though Corn can express lonely anguish or metaphysical struggle, his body of poetry is, on the whole, abundant with a feeling of friendship, love, travel, nature, and the felicities of the senses and the mind. Corn owes much to such poets as Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens, and to such contemporaries as James Merrill and John Ashbery, but his synthesis is his own. The studied openness of his style is matched by the balance of frankness and subtlety in his voice, most clearly seen in the honest, quiet manner in which he handles his homosexuality. A similar balance is evident in his approach to all his subjects...