SOURCE: Rector, Liam. “The Documentary of What Is.” Hudson Review 41, no. 2 (summer 1988): 393-400.

In the following excerpt, Rector examines the lyrical structure and sense of character that mark Rose, comparing Lee's work to Rainer Maria Rilke's.

Much of the recent chatter about poetry has centered upon “form” as it exists solely in the prosodic, technical sense, and the debate between the “new formalists” (nothing new there, really?) and “free verse” hounds us into the present. In a truly amusing inversion, it's now the formalists lobbing grenades into the foxholes of the free verse status quo. Oh, the pendulum … and beneath it, or to the side of it, real history. Whether one is working in received patterns which exist a priori to the composition of a poem, forms which are then adhered to, expanded upon, corrupted, tricked-out, or reinvented, or whether one composes “by field” in an “organic” grid...