I think I'd know "Am I My Neighbor's Keeper?" as an Eberhart poem even if Richard Eberhart hadn't signed it. Words like "veils," "unanswerable," and "the profound" are Eberhart's hallmark; and syntax like "but no great harm" is unmistakably his. Such language may, in itself, appear to veil what's finally profound in Eberhart's work; but the great originality of this present poem lies, dramatically, in how it lifts those veils of traditional language which surround the profound irrationality of its "inexplicable essence." The New Criticism has predisposed us to carefully inductive poems, rationally structured toward carefully limited conclusions. But like Eberhart's fine "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," this new poem moves by deduction, and risks within itself a drama of deducing the specifically human relevance of its introductory abstractions. Innocently rational in form and first assertion as this poem is, it deduces and unveils (within its language) an...