SOURCE: "Intimations of Inadequacy," in Poetry, Vol. CLXII, No. 3, June, 1993, pp. 160-66.

Below, Richman argues that in Justice's poetry form takes precedence over subject matter.

Donald Justice is one of our most reticent poets. He may very well be the most reticent poet of his generation—the generation of Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, Adrienne Rich, and the late Howard Nemerov. For Justice is even more sparing in output than the notoriously slow-working and slow-to-publish Hecht. "I'm not all that much for increasing the world's population of poems," Justice once said in an interview. Of his four books of all original material—The Summer Anniversaries (1960), Night Light (1967), Departures (1973), and The Sunset Maker (1987)—two were fifty-two pages or less. (A 137-page Selected Poems, containing seventeen new poems, came out in 1979.) No wonder Justice's 171-page Reader, which has seven previously uncollected poems, is as slender as it is.

Justice...