To what extent Merwin has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Rousseau or Novalis or Shelley, I will not hazard a guess. It is difficult, however, to read his two most recent collections, The Compass Flower and Feathers from the Hill, without thinking of those earlier writers. For one thing, the poems in the books are full of nature—lots of wind and rain, rocks and trees, sky and breaking waves—and urban life, when it is treated, is regarded as a pretty sorry affair. For another, the tone of the poems is intensely private: even poems which express a longing to escape the self are obsessively introspective. Finally, the poems aspire to artlessness: they are "free," and free with a vengeance. Characteristic of the poems in The Compass Flower is "Apples."… The units of syntax here tend to coincide with the linear units of the poem, but...