More than ever, Richard Howard's poems convey the sense of personal history transformed into a fable that is worth hearing. There is a powerful personality behind the poems of Fellow Feelings, and the individual pieces, from the opening poem "Decades," to "Howard's Way" and "Compulsive Qualifications," to "The Giant on Giant Killing" and "Vocational Guidance," convey this personality with a clarity that relates it to something larger, for the poems of Fellow Feelings are also about art, and thus the personal history that colors them becomes part of the larger story of the modern artist. It is a familiar story of wounds that must be turned to profit, of inspiration that comes mysteriously and cannot be denied, of achievement which solves nothing but makes the need to persist more acute.

The three finest poems in the volume are in the third section of the book, devoted mainly to...