Despite his habitual doodling with other men's idioms … in the hope that something critically significant will occur, Mr. Blackmur has achieved institutional status among the company, not inconsiderable in numbers, for whom "words alone are certain good." He can pursue and isolate any subtlety provided it is sufficiently encased in language. His virtues are clearest [in Language as Gesture] in the very early essay on Cummings, where Cummings' way of turning terms into flat absolutes—"flower" isn't a flower but a cant term for anything the poet happens to hold in esteem—is subtly anatomized into twenty-four pages of scrupulous sentences in which we never lose confidence. And he is excellent—disregarding the pinnulate writing—on Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, and pretty good on Hart Crane and Marianne Moore, all of them poets whose effects depend chiefly on closed systems of words interacting. On such subjects he...