SOURCE: Wilson, Milton. “Poet without a Muse.” Canadian Literature, no. 30 (autumn 1966): 14-20.

In the following review of Selected Poems 1940-1966, Wilson focuses attention on the punctuation and spelling revisions Birney made to previously published works before including them in this collection.

You might suppose that Earle Birney was too busy creating new poems to worry about collecting old ones. But for a writer whose old poems never stop pestering him to be transformed into new ones, the first task is hard to separate from the second. These Selected Poems 1940-1966 aren't really a retrospective show; they challenge us to see Birney not so much plain as anew. I've read his work far too often in the past to make a fresh look very easy. What follows is at best a series of notes towards an unwritten revised portrait.

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The more Birney you read, the less he looks like...