Richard Eberhart, from the beginning of his career, has often displayed that intense insight into reality which characterizes the poet whose gift is close to Blakean vision. This sort of insight works most frequently from a base of sharply apprehended reality, to rise toward levels where the fact at once dissolves and condenses into meaning. Eberhart's poem "The Groundhog" illustrates this power of transformation and transcendence very clearly indeed; and many of the poems of his early and middle period, including the extraordinary "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," advance step by step from the observed fact to the resolving universal intimation.

And Eberhart, an assiduous writer, has been steadily engaged in experiments with form, over the years. He has been experimental within form—that is, he has worked inside poetry's conventional rules, modifying them within boundaries, instead of denying all formal precedent (as is the habit of many...