When I first began reading Kenneth Patchen's poetry, I can remember the novelty of his recklessly abandoning himself to the free play of child-like imagination. His lurid fantasies—beatific and inflammatory, by turns—seemed, at the time, the perfect antidote to the sterile technical perfection of the work of most newer poets in the mid-Fifties. Now, as I sift through the ample selections from Patchen's many volumes [in The Collected Poems], hunting for the luminous apocalyptic passages, I find that the moments of brilliance grew rarer as his career advanced. He continued to employ, endlessly, the same stock devices, such as his predilection for shocking the reader with weird mixtures of humor and terror. When Patchen began writing, the imagination of surrealism was an innovatory rarity in American poetry, and he is to be credited still with being among the first to work seriously in this mode. But...