SOURCE: "John and Liz, Phil and Ed," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXII, No. 21, July 14, 1986, pp. 82-3.

Balliet is an American journalist, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following review, he remarks favorably on The Golden Gate.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, the long poem (epic, narrative, meditative, pastoral), entrenched for almost three hundred years, was slowly dispossessed by the Victorian novel. The long poem has made sporadic returns—in the work of Eliot, Pound, Auden, Spender, Betjeman, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, and Alfred Corn, and in the cousinly verse novels and verse plays of the Benét brothers, Christopher La Farge, Maxwell Anderson, Christopher Fry, and Eliot. And now we have, like the reappearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Vikram Seth's verse (and first) novel, The Golden Gate. Some essential statistics: The book has five hundred and ninety-four stanzas, including a stanza each for...