SOURCE: Crase, Douglas. “On Lorine Niedecker.” Raritan 12, no. 2 (fall 1992): 47-70.

In the following essay, Crase discusses Niedecker's “Lake Superior”.

Poetry is words: though when I think of the Whitman who found he incorporates gneiss, the Stein who says anybody is as their land and air is, the Stevens who locates mythology in stone out of our fields or from under our mountains, then I have to admit that the sublimest American poetry has always read to me as if it hoped to restore, or even realize its desire for a wealth outside words. That is what I always liked about it. It is what I liked at once about Lorine Niedecker's “Lake Superior,” that spare ferropastoral of a poem in honor of the rock and mineral wealth

Iron the common element of earth

for which the human species is just another mode of transport. I also have to...