In 1967, M. L. Rosenthal, in The New Poets, described a number of poets he found to have some tenuous connection with Robert Bly's The Sixties and said of them "… this group, which includes Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Louis Simpson, James Wright, and James Dickey, is seeking to affect the aims of American poetry…." (p. 10)

More than two decades have passed since the first books of these poets appeared and though it is still unclear that any of their names will name the literary age to be described in anthologies years hence, no serious reader of poetry can be unaware that each has affected not only what American poetry is but also what it might be. If it is impossible to think of Bly, Hall, Simpson, Wright, and Dickey as conspirators of one mind, it is nevertheless true that together they have created poetry of a surfaced, examined, and...