SOURCE: “David Wagoner,” in Alone in America: The Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, Thames and Hudson, 1970, pp. 533–51.

In the following essay, Howard surveys and praises Wagoner's works, emphasizing in the development in his novels and poetry a poetic intelligence that wrests a sense of positive identity from a vision of negation.

David Wagoner, in his forties and a professor of English, is as well the only writer his age I can think of in America today who is, by the difficult criteria which hold the noun together with the adjective in solution, en gelée even, both a successful poet and a successful novelist. What I mean, of course, is that he is not entirely—not merely—a Success, not a success like Allen Ginsberg, say, or Norman Mailer. If you manage to be a success like that—and in America today, management appears, surely...