At first sight, Louis Dudek's long poem Atlantis appears to be a re-working of the material of his earlier volume Europe (1953), since the imagery and structure of both are drawn from a North American's passionate pilgrimage in various parts of Europe. However, this volume is at once more concrete and more philosophical; he is not just looking for Europe, but for a submerged continent, a vision of a kind of Platonic reality underlying the dizzying multiplicity of human experience. He explains his procedure thus:

            Every object a word, language, the record we make
            a literal transcription,
                      then a translation
            into moral, abstract meaning.

The "translations" are the weakest aspect of the poem: too often Mr. Dudek's abstractions become rather ponderous, and the rhythm of the verse, so surely handled throughout much of the poem, tends to go flat.

Perhaps the most satisfactory parts of the poem are those...