[Davidson's] poetic achievement has been continuous and considerable. Indeed it can reasonably be argued on the basis of his … collection of verse (1961), The Long Street (Davidson's favorite metaphor for his imaginative experience of life in this century), that his finest, most impressive poetry is coming at the end of his career; and what distinguishes and gives especial value to these productions of his artistic maturity is precisely what has set him off from his poetic contemporaries since the Fugitive days and the first publication of The Tall Men (1927)—a preference for and personal possession of a traditional idiom and sense of the metaphorical potential of the familiar. These he has drawn from the main streams of our Western cultural heritage, from Scripture, classics, and (as Louise Cowan has well described it) "a sacramental view of nature." That he seriously means this idiom and these metaphors gives to him...