If, as Robert Frost pointed out, the purpose of any poem is to be different from every other poem, Ariel fails. We read the same poem over and over. The same techniques recur. Subjects are not really examined, explored, reviewed. They become opportunities for the personality to impose itself; they are reviled, distorted, made terrifying. People turn into things; things turn into monsters. After a while one knows exactly how the poet will respond…. Without surprise, poems become dull. The intensity of emotion out of which Ariel undoubtedly grew loses its force for the reader.

Ariel must be the dead-end of romanticism. It represents a kind of sentimentality—not the "Truth is a velvet doe with large and dewy eyes" variety, but the "Truth is a malevolent fungus stalking us like a nightmare" kind. Each poem insists life is not worth it, thereby indicting poetry, too. Ariel asks...