SOURCE: "'Avec une Élégance Grave et Lente': The Poetry of Donald Justice," in Verse, Vols. 8-9, Nos. 3 and 1, Winter-Spring, 1992, pp. 44-9.

In the following essay, Bawer defends Justice's work against hostile critics, stating that the negative criticism stems from Justice's reluctance to conform to the styles of his peers.

On the American poetry scene these days, the only thing rarer than a fine poem is a negative review. Yet reviewers of Donald Justice—who has written some of the finest poems of our time—have often been not only negative but surprisingly hostile. Calvin Bedient, assessing Justice's 1979 Selected Poems in the Sewanee Review, described him as "an uncertain talent that has not been turned to much account." Wrote Gerald Burns: "Selected Poems reads like a very thin Tennessee Williams—little poems about obscure Florida people and architecture…. As a career his, though honest, does not quite make...