In "Fiction and the Figures of Life" Mr. Gass said that "the esthetic aim of any fiction is the creation of a verbal world, or a significant part of such a world, alive through every order of its Being." The only difference I can find between this and the argument of "The World Within the Word" is that the autonomy of that world within the word is declared more insistently than before….

If you say that a poem is a world, or makes a world, you merely ascribe to the poet the powers of God or the ambition of Absolute Idealism. There is little harm in talking about a poem as a well-wrought urn, because you're not claiming that the whole world has been consigned to the urn, without remainder….

My only quarrel with Mr. Gass is that he hasn't really examined the problems raised by referring to...