Edward Dorn is one of the two or three best American poets now writing….

Dorn is very much an American poet, and he has created a distinctively American idiom…. [Gunslinger is] a specifically American work, using a dissonance which jars the European ear and a melodramatic virility which used to be characteristic of "the frontier" myth. The poems [in The Collected Poems, 1956–1974] show this language in the making; the earliest in the book are placed within that blank landscape, and within some long, emphatic lines which go right back to Whitman…. But Dorn sometimes makes his points too well:

In America every art has to reach toward some clarity. That is our hope from the start.

English poets have also practised clarity, with varying degrees of success, for some centuries now; in fact, it is a general mistake of American writers to confuse clarity with sincerity. As Dorn...