New York: Random House, (1981) dj. Hardcover first edition - A book which warns against looking for hidden meanings in poems - "A good poem means just what it says, and it suggests what it suggests... If a poet writes well, what he says is to be found in the words that are actually there, almost always in the commonest meanings." In addition to the essays, this includes selections of poetry by twenty-three poets, among them Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot, as well as Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka and John Ashbery, and translations of such modern European poets such as Lorca, Rilke, Rimbaud, Apollinaire and Mayakowsky. Brief biographies, index. xvii, 312 pp. ISBN: 0-394509749.