John Taggart is one of the most important figures of what one might call the third generation of twentieth-century American experimental poets. He grew up with the innovations of the High Modernists--Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens-- as a set of achievements almost too obvious to be acknowledged. Taggart turned for more immediate stimulus to the works of poets born in the first decade of this century, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson, and to an even younger group who followed them, including Robert Duncan and William Bronk. But Taggart's poetry is unusual among that of his contemporaries, for he has avoided both the talky, conversational poetics of the poetry workshop and the hypertheoretical technicalization of the art advocated by the proponents of Language poetry. Instead, he has with uncompromising single-mindedness pursued a poetics of both musicality and vision, exploring through his work aspects of the spiritual--even...