Stanley Burnshaw is probably best known as the author of The Seamless Web (1970), a study of the ontology of poetry and a defense of its importance in human life, which James Dickey, reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review (24 September 1972), judged to be "the most exciting, releasing book on the nature of poetry since Biographia Literaria." His own work as a poet, extending over more than fifty years, is not so widely known to the general reader. It admirably exemplifies his theoretical dicta, that poetry is "the expression of the creator's total organism" and that its role, when "the war against Nature has been confidently waged and won," is to answer the question "Now that man is victorious, how shall he stay alive"" Briefly during the 1930s, Burnshaw uneasily shared some of the Marxist assumptions that seemed an answer to the time's dismay, but the...