Book Description
Taken from throughout Mills’s career, the essays collected in this volume delve into the work of such influential writers as Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov, Samuel Beckett, Galway Kinnell, Edith Sitwell, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, Isabella Gardner, James Wright, David Ignatow, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, and Stanley Kunitz. Mills examines how the personal element informs the works of these writers and enables them "to speak to us, without impediment, from the deep center of a personal engagement with existence."

About the Author
Ralph J. Mills, Jr. is a significant figure in contemporary poetry for his work as a poet, critic, and professor. His poetry collections include LIVING WITH DISTANCE, A WINDOW IN AIR, and MARCH LIGHT, which received the Carl Sandburg Award. He also edited the selected prose and letters of Theodore Roethke. From 1962 to 1965 he served as Assistant Professor and Associate Chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

FROM THE PUBLISHER