SOURCE: Burt, John. “W. S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 19, no. 3 (winter 2000): 115-34.

In the following review, Burt examines Merwin's book-length poem The Folding Cliffs, declaring it one of the few distinguished narrative poems of the 1990s.

Over the last two hundred years, poetry has ceded much of its intellectual territory to fiction. Where once not merely the central myths and metaphysical speculations of Western culture were written in verse but also its legal codes and even its genealogies, verse has become in the twentieth century more and more limited to areas of private feeling, able to speculate on the broadest matters only when, as in Pound or Zukofsky, those speculations are the extended workings-out of a private sensibility's enthusiasms. Every few years there is a brief flush of interest in narrative poetry, but it seems always to turn out that the form is no...