A central theme of Murray Krieger's criticism has been the uniqueness of poetry. (With the New Critics he uses the term poetry to refer to all canonical works of imaginative literature, regardless of genre.) For Krieger poetry is a special kind of discourse different from other uses of language. He contends, for example, that a literary work of art, unlike conventional speech, is autonomous rather than derivative inasmuch as its principles of structure come from within itself and not from external sources. Rejecting formalism's closure of art on itself, however, Krieger also finds in poetry a privileged capacity to reveal experience. As he explains in Poetic Presence and Illusion (1979), "the special properties of poetic discourse, its ways of meaning, ... can permit it to open vistas of vision which normal discourse, by its very nature, seems determined to shut off." Indeed, he says in The Play and the Place...