[If one] cut away the puffed romantic locks [from Collected Poems 1930–1976] …, there would be almost nothing left. Too many self-congratulatory poems, in any case, on the superiority of being a poet—the reader feels like a bored voyeur. (p. 363)

The writing is almost never happy. Typically American in this, Eberhart struggled all his life for an individual manner, mixing gaucheness and gracefulness in an unstable, not quite convincing way. Consider again the celebrated last stanza of "Fury of Aerial Bombardment":

   Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,
   Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
   But they are gone to early death, who late in school
   Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.

Was his true gift after all for the impersonality of these lines? How Latin, incidentally, their restrained sinuous rhetoric and ammoniac pungency. We might have had a Housman with contemporary...