Mr. Snodgrass's modest hope [for In Radical Pursuit: Critical Essays and Lectures]—"I hope my own essays lean toward a broader humanism (than that of the New Critics)—one less concerned with being right, and more concerned with enrichment"—[has] indeed been fulfilled. His personal involvement, his personal style, his conviction that "the world, and we ourselves, are far too complex to be accounted for in any political doctrine, philosophical doctrine, conscious ideation," his sense "that every important act in our lives is both propelled and guided by the darker, less visible areas of emotion and personality"—all [stand] triumphantly vindicated by the light he [sheds] on the processes of creation of literature and on the product of those processes, literature itself.

The "Four Personal Lectures" which make up the first section of this book are studies in how poetry achieves its effects. They deal with its nature...