For nearly half a century Mr. Kunitz has been giving us poems remarkable for their compactness and force. Now, in his seventieth year, he presents us with [A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly,] a collection of prose pieces which—being drawn from many times and many publications—might seem superficially to be too disparate to cohere an an organic whole, constituting one more bibliographically useful but experientially unsatisfying potpourri. But Mr. Kunitz is not a superficial writer, and he deserves more than a superficial response. "All the arts join in testifying that the order that interests the modern imagination is not a sequential order," he writes in his study of Keats. That is true, and it is another way of saying what many of his contemporaries have forgotten: that the invalidation of chronology is not the invalidation of order itself. Mr. Kunitz has many of the...