Yeats remarked … that his grand intent was "to hold in a single thought reality and justice." That project—reconciling man's tropism toward the light with his experience of a world that seems, as often as not, designed to thwart it—is, of course, a perennial concern of poets. Few have been more preoccupied with the task than Richard Eberhart, who is perhaps the most distinguished survivor of a tradition that remained potent well into this century but that has been partially eclipsed by the nihilist tendencies of the day, the tradition of religious romanticism whose greatest modern exemplars are Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and Roethke. If Eberhart sometimes strikes readers as an anomalous figure, it may be because his closest affinities have been not with his contemporaries, whatever their stripe, but with earlier Romantics—Wordsworth, Blake, and Hopkins in particular. I shall seek … to indicate the...