David Wagoner Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Taylor

Critical Essay by John Taylor

SOURCE: A review of Walt Whitman Bathing, in Poetry, Vol. 171, No., January, 1998, pp. 229–32.

In the following essay, Taylor praises Wagoner for writing poetry that simultaneously celebrates self-transcendence and the “ontological durability” of certain “essential emotions.”

One way of interpreting the adage “art is long, but life is short” is to point out the difficulty of attaining clarity. David Wagoner knows what this challenge implies, for Walt Whitman Bathing confirms once again his ability to arrive at an admirable transparency, without compromising stylistic nuance or philosophical scope. Even when gently ironic (see the touching “For a Woman Who Phoned Poetry Northwest Thinking It Was Poultry Northwest”), the man advances maskless, costume-less, bearing a precious gift: sincerity. His insights run deep and are expressed with a soft-spoken directness intimately linked to his skepticism about man's role in the cosmos. Wagoner talks quietly with us—even when not penned in the...
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