Peter Davison is not one poet, he is an anthology of poets. By turns he can sound like Auden, like Randall Jarrell, like Thomas Hardy, like Frost, like Roethke, like, even, would you believe Tennyson?…

Make no mistake, [in Pretending to Be Asleep] Mr. Davison is not writing parodies. He does not, like the parodist, zero in on a writer's mannerisms, and hammer them into absurdity. Nor is he writing imitation, lifeless ventriloquist's dummies fashioned on well-known models. He seems rather to be pacing himself against his masters, attempting to bring off new and original poems in traditional modalities. And, amazingly, the experiment works.

Though now he alludes to Yeats, now modifies a phrase from Sir Thomas Wyatt, now employs an epigraph from Coleridge, the effect Mr. Davison achieves is not "literary" in the pejorative sense. In poem after poem he at once transcends his sources, and at...