SOURCE: Vendler, Helen. “Anglo-Celtic Attitudes.” New York Review of Books 44, no. 17 (6 November 1997): 57-60.

In the following excerpt, Vendler compliments both Selected Poems: 1968-1986 and The Annals of Chile, though she expresses reservations over Muldoon's tendency toward emotional detachment and cryptic allusions.

When the United States became a superpower after World War II, Americans became less deferential toward English writers, with the consequence that, on the whole, postwar American readers knew little of the poetry being written in the British Isles and Ireland. Auden maintained a hold on the American audience because he lived here, and Dylan Thomas flashed briefly through the country, but apart from those two imports, modern British poets made almost no impression on the United States. We were content to let them (and the poets of the Commonwealth countries and Ireland) work in their separate sphere. This depressing situation was compounded by the gradual but...