More a document than a poem, The Bloomingdale Papers is a meditation on the several months of lost time Hayden Carruth spent in a mental institution during the early 1950s. It was written in conditions of extreme isolation: on a typewriter, in the ward, as the author's way of helping his doctors to understand him. Now it is offered, out of context, to the "candid reader" of a different age, who can know little of the peculiar and personal circumstances that gave it a more than clinical meaning. The overall effect is jarring and yet, it must be said, moving. This is after all a report from the front. Nothing in it shines so clearly as the plain desperate need to communicate: it is this that makes Mr. Carruth's case more than a case and imparts to his predicament, for a moment, the sense of something vital and...