In "Final Solutions" … the satiric involvement of a young poet … with his time and place is total. Like Juvenal, Swift, and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (at his best), Seidel is angry, and his anger, ultimately, is directed less against evils apparent in this or that person or society than against the basic stupidities and depravities of mankind itself. Seidel is in earnest. He radiates heat. It is apparent that he has asked himself frightful questions and has not dodged the implications of their equally frightful answers. He presents his own anguish less often than he describes the suffering of a number of protagonists who reveal themselves fragmentarily in monologues—always at some high pitch of terror, ecstasy, or despair. These men and women (and a single ghost) speak, more often than not, in formal stanzas. Seidel instinctively goes over into strictly controlled (although uneven) metre and into...