SOURCE: “The Harvard Advocate,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. 745–54.

In the following review, Goldstein assesses three examples of Hall's nonfiction works—Principal Products of Portugal, Death to the Death of Poetry, and Life Work,—and explores what these works reveal about his poetry.

These days the theory of literature has taken up, again, the infinitely interesting matter of literary production—how writing gets written, revised, edited, published, distributed, reviewed, reprinted, canonized. It is a subject that has fascinated Donald Hall all of his life, the more so after 1975, when he resigned from his tenured position in the English Department at the University of Michigan to return to his ancestral farmhouse in New Hampshire and begin life as a free-lance in the literary marketplace. His principal goal in going it alone, liberated from the routine of teaching, grading, serving on committees and socializing with other academics...