Robert B. Shaw is a poet, critic, and professor who has the unusual distinction of having spent virtually all his adult life within Ivy League universities before his move to Mount Holyoke College, where he is currently a professor of English. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1960s, Shaw studied poetry with Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Lowell from whom he learned his mastery of traditional poetic meter and forms. As it turns out, Shaw was to emerge from this atmosphere as one of the first poets among his generation to eschew the "radical" poetics of the sort promulgated in the manifestos eventually collected in 1973 by Donald Allen and Warren Tallman in The Poetics of the New American Poetry. Shaw's first book-length collection of poems, Comforting the Wilderness (1977), was pointed to by Dana Gioia, in his essay "Notes on the New Formalism" in the Hudson Review (Autumn...