SOURCE: “Three Poets,” in Commentary, Vol. 8, June, 1949, pp. 611-12.

In the following excerpt, Weiss remarks on Poems, noting Ignatow's concern with the lives of the urban working class.

If last is the position of honor in an omnibus review, then it belongs to David Ignatow. That he is a poet at all is a modest but encouraging testament to the resiliency of the poet in a difficult place and time. He lives honestly at the bottom of a world and manages to make poetry out of it. But it is a healthy bottom, far below fakery and the “literary world”; and though it has been said of Ignatow that he is the kind of poet who may confuse art with artifice, we'll take the chance. He is a poet the hard way, whose considerable spiritual sweat in the tenements and on the streets of the East Side actually...