SOURCE: "Low Road Leading Nowhere," in Karl Shapiro, Twayne Publishers, 1981, pp. 133-56.

In the following essay, Reino provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of The Bourgeois Poet.

Several years prior to the appearance of "Dome of Sunday" in the generally well-received Person, Place and Thing, the son of a European dictator visited the United States (October 1937) and expressed sentiments not unlike those poeticized in the final stanza of that poem. AntiFascist committees denounced the visit, warned President Roosevelt not to receive the dictator's son into the White House, and complained that he "bombed defenseless Ethiopians and afterwards stated that he enjoyed it very much." He was widely quoted in the media as having said that the sight of bombs bursting was "beautiful." Even Hollywood, which he briefly visited, could not "breathe freely" until the "rotund little enfant terrible" was gone.¹

The inexplicable moods of the final stanza of...