Until the first half of the 1980s, Phyllis Webb was regarded as a reclusive and reluctant poet. She herself had written, "I refuse to publish because I refuse to write. What I've written I hoard, hoping the poems will eventually turn into satisfactory failures." Asked to explain, she said that, if she knew the poems she tries to write were failures, they would be satisfactory because she would not have to publish them--or be a poet. And yet her work has been consistently praised by the critics. Northrop Frye hailed her 1980 book, Wilson's Bowl , as "a landmark in Canadian poetry." When that volume failed to win even a nomination for a Governor General's Award, a group of poets led by Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, B. P. Nichol, and P. K. Page collected $2,300 and sent it to Webb, stating that "this gesture is a response to your whole body...