In a Chicago Review contributor's note (Summer 1982), Turner Cassity described himself as a poet who, "in his own sedate way, is perhaps the wildest of the students of the late Yvor Winters." The remark is typical Cassity--laconic while simultaneously self-effacing and outrageous. It is also accurate. While Cassity has never obscured his debt and allegiance to Winters, there are many ways in which he does not exactly fit the "Wintersian" mold; at least the influence of Winters is not so immediately apparent as it is in much of the work of such diversely talented poets as Thom Gunn, Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Charles Gullans, and Robert Pinsky. Nevertheless,for better or worse, much of the praise for Cassity's work has come from sympathetic readers of Winters--Gullans, Donald Davie, Robert von Hallberg, and Timothy Steele. But a few poets more indebted to W.H. Auden than to Winters--Richard...