I always find difficulty in adequately explaining my faint misgivings on reading the work of W. S. Merwin. For, though he doesn't have the range of Nemerov, he has an exceptional control over the resources of language and movement, an understanding of the relation between which enables him to perform, for instance, the audacities of documentary language in "Cape Dread" and "The Portland Going Out" in [The Drunk in the Furnace]. And each poem, moreover, has a beautiful self-sufficiency: part is linked to part firmly and cleanly.

Why, then, do his poems not interest more? In a sense, it may be that a poem by Merwin is too self-sufficient. It has reference only to the subject, which is not usually placed in a world larger than itself…. Merwin lacks that absorption in his subject matter which paradoxically ends by making a poem look outward, to the rest of...