[W. D. Snodgrass's] lyricism is not only the most consistent among the confessional poets, it is the most insistent…. His syllabics and stresses and rhyme schemes are not meant to rationalize or palliate his subject, but to balance its emotional demands and accommodate contradictory experiences and feelings: a language "alive" to the life it records. That life, in its meter-making argument, does not touch the extremes of madness or longing that heighten the work of Sexton, Lowell, Plath and Berryman…. Just as his verse is the successor to the severe, homely lyrics of Hardy and Frost, so too his losses and betrayals are the familiar ones, circumscribed by the small-town society to which our playwrights and novelists have accustomed us…. In an early essay on D. H. Lawrence, Snodgrass predicts the thrust of all his own later work: "To know one's needs is really to know one's own...