SOURCE: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at David Wagoner's New Poems,” in Western Humanities Review, Vol. 35, No. 3, Autumn, 1981, pp. 267–72.

In the following essay, despite his appreciation of Wagoner's poetic virtues, Peters sees him as a safe, nonadventurous poet with comfortable middle-class, middle-age sensibilities.

The Blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime. 

Wallace Stevens

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“David Wagoner seems to me one of our best poets, perhaps one of the best we have ever had in this country.”

—Robert Boyers, Kenyon Review, jacket blurb for David Wagoner's Collected Poems: 1956–1976, Indiana U. P. 1976.

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David Wagoner is one of the country's most prolific poets, and probably is in line for a laureateship, if indeed such a post should ever materialize in America. Landfall is his 11th book of poems. He is also the author of ten novels, the editor of Theodore Roethke's Notebooks, a chancellor...