A persistent complaint about the American poetry of the 1970s and 1980s is that the writers (often academics) became almost exclusively concerned with themselves and the symbolic possibilities of their lives, writing in first person and creating metaphorical systems so reliant upon personal intuition or events that they shut out most readers. Critics often point to such a tendency as a major reason for the public's turn away from contemporary poetry. Larry Levis unfortunately came to symbolize for many critics the self-referential writer pampered by the academic ivory tower and spending his writing career in endless exploration of himself. He has been awarded important prizes, including the International Poetry Forum United States Award (1971), a Lamont Poetry prize (1976), a National Poetry Series Award (1981), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1973); his work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Field, Poetry, the Antioch Review, the New Yorker, and...