It is difficult … to examine adequately the exceptional qualities of Thomas Merton—because they are so many. If you tried to come up with the components that go into the making of a first-rate poet, your prototype might bear an uncanny resemblance to him. Put simply, Merton is one of our great poetic talents of this century. If anybody has doubts, the Collected Poems should quickly dispel them. Reading the work entire is like entering a unique world created just for the occasion. It is no hasty construction, but a self-sustaining environment in which the landscape has been filled out, in which the living and the dead are real. It is as if the poet had tasted and understood every essence that makes up the world we live in, and out of the banquet proceeded to remake it and shape his own. Isn't this the ultimate aim of...