I've always found Ed's poetry pretty flat. He once said to me, re. Richard Wilbur, "I wish I had an idiom like his." I haven't read [i]Gabriel[i] except for the bits and pieces in the NYer and on Amazon. Trying to critique a poem on such a subject is well nigh impossible; a prose memoir might have been a better medium, though. And I'm teaching "Lycidas" tomorrow.
|