SOURCE: A review of The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, in Poetry, Vol. CXLIX, No. 2, November, 1986, pp. 98-100.

In the following review of The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, Shaw remarks: "Warts and all, this is a collection animated by a seriousness of purpose, a vocational commitment which few poets nowadays can match."

I wonder why Hayden Carruth has not made this selection of his poetry [in The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth] himself. Galway Kinnell, who supplies an appreciative foreword, has done the job; it is unclear to what extent the author has been consulted. I can well imagine that someone who writes as copiously as Carruth might find the task of winnowing past work onerous. He is not only prolific but, as a stylist, extremely varied. In his readiness to experiment, to move on, he reminds one of the final lines of Frost's great poem, "The...