Whole, humanly scaled satisfactions have almost disappeared from poetry in the present age. The studied avoidance of affectation preached and practiced in the workshops has produced much leaden whimsy and vers libre list-making, but little in the way of poetry. The added attraction of rarity, then, attaches to James Schuyler's work, work that is not of the first order in power or invention, but which nevertheless gratifies by its harmony and balance. These poems [in The Morning of the Poem] full of rueful good humor and always appropriate to their occasions, yield a kind of pleasure that seems destined, not many years hence, to be as much a memory as civil conversation or unpretentious cooking.

The shorter poems contained in the first half of this new book are, on the whole, somewhat thinner than Schuyler's earlier lyrics. Their tone is flatter, more reportorial, depending more on right understatement...