Christopher Middleton has been an increasingly important influence on writing in English since the mid-1950s. His poems, stories, translations, and essays have demonstrated consistent refusal to disregard the more unsettling discoveries of both romanticism and high modernism. Unlike most of his contemporaries in Britain and the United States, Middleton has viewed the art and craft of writing as a hazardous, disruptive, and visionary enterprise, one in which the poet as maker undertakes to shape a language into original ways of saying and, therefore, of knowing for a shaken and uncertain world. His literary heroes and heroines are vulnerable human beings, but they do not work in confessional modes, although for him poetry at its most intense in such modes "can show what savage stuff a creative individual is made of." In his best-known essay "Reflections on a Viking Prow," which appeared in PN Review in 1979 and 1980, Middleton...