SOURCE: “The Apprentice Work: Dry Sun, Dry Wind and A Place to Stand,” in The World of David Wagoner, University of Idaho Press, 1997, pp. 15–37.

In the following essay, McFarland surveys Wagoner's early poetry, and traces the development of his themes, technique, voice, and poetic identity.

The year 1953 saw the publication of Theodore Roethke's fourth collection of poems, The Waking, for which he was to win the Pulitzer Prize, and of David Wagoner's first collection, Dry Sun, Dry Wind, which shows clearly the impact of Roethke, to whom it is dedicated, as well as the influence of what might be regarded as the “formalist project.” In 1948, W. H. Auden, who had reversed T. S. Eliot's course and become an American citizen two years earlier, won the Pulitzer Prize for his long poem, The Age of Anxiety. A proponent of high craft and formalism in poetry, Auden was to exert...