To describe the poetry of Allen Grossman as "eccentric" seems inevitable: it is relatively unimitated; it is independent of the predominant schools and movements of contemporary poetry; and it is difficult in ways that other difficult poetry of its time is not. In other words, it is not representative of a given kind of postmodern American poetry, nor does it conform to common notions of exemplary originality. Like most poets of his generation, Grossman was greatly influenced by the work of the modernists--in his case, especially by William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane; but unlike his contemporaries, he has not mitigated these modernists' claims about the high office of the poet. Instead Grossman has consistently attempted to regain their poetics, and especially their practice of an elevated style, at the risk of the obscurity that follows from his disinterest in the rhetorics of contemporaneity pioneered by...