Although John Hall Wheelock could admire the less-obscure experiments of his poetic contemporaries, his own poetry was firmly grounded in the poetic past, especially in the romantic tradition of William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Combining formal regularity with a passionate clarity of expression, Wheelock's poems are most often concerned with the wondrous beauty of life and the sublimity of artistic accomplishment. He imbued many of his early poems with an athletic vigor which suggested the influence of William Ernest Henley to several critics, while his later poetry is more mystical and often darker in tone. More than a dozen volumes of Wheelock's poetry appeared between 1905 and 1978, and, during his unusually long career, Wheelock won many of this nation's most-prestigious poetry awards, including the 1962 Bollingen Prize. His position as assistant and then successor to Maxwell Perkins of Scribners allowed him, too, to advance the careers of...