Although his title [The Old Poetries and the New] might imply an evolutionary understanding of the relationship between traditional and avant-garde poetries, Kostelanetz finds them to be engaged in a battle to the death. His dichotomous view of contemporary poetry (one often gets the feeling that a poet is either experimental or morally deficient) comes across very strong in this retrospective, and one suspects that Kostelanetz's polemical tone may in itself have significantly hindered the development of the new poetry.

Surveying the old poetries in a series of reviews and articles on American poetry since 1949, Kostelanetz expresses an almost obsessive fear of and distaste for any poetry that can be associated—if only by virture of an anthology—with the university. To be sure, his descriptions of contemporary poetry at its worst ("a soft surrealism … willfully mysterious, and, of necessity, attitudinally poetic") are frequently to the point and...