In Lowell's work I have always felt a giant pressure exerted on language and experience, not only in dense and highly wrought poems but in relatively conversational and casual ones as well. In the wide range of poetry that this force has given us, I continue to distinguish two kinds that I noted years ago in "Exile's Return," the opening poem in Lord Weary's Castle: the first unverifiable, so to speak, being chiefly dreamwork and earwork ("The search-guns click and spit and split up timber"), the second verifiable, public, and powerful ("A rough cathedral lifts its eye."). His new poem, "Ulysses And Circe," contains both these types of imagination. It is a realization of myth and at the same time a mythification of reality. Lowell has made his own fiction out of experience including that of the Circe episode of The Odyssey. He "translates" the three central persons...