American verse is probably passing through a peculiar period when the word disturbing can, unadorned, serve as commendation on a dust jacket. The willing reader, or at least the willing reader of advertisements and blurbs for books of contemporary poetry, is offered disturbing collections and disturbing new voices and disturbing sensibilities.

To this particular reader of poetry, the word seems ironically appropriate. For while the books themselves are apt to prove not so much disturbing in any tonic, regenerative sense as simply dismaying, the state of contemporary verse as a whole does seem disturbing in the prime, portentous connotations of the word—worrisome, unsettling, even destructive.

Anyone generalizing about contemporary American poetry must first acknowledge that given its diffuse, factionalized condition any conclusions must be presented with hesitation. For diffusion more than any unifying trait defines its fundamental nature, and indeed at once provides the generalizer with one impregnably safe generalization: American poetry has never passed through such a scattered era. This diffusion may be a result of the deaths in the last few decades of so many of its ablest practitioners and guides (Eliot, Frost, Roethke, Bishop, Berryman—and these but begin the unhappy list), or perhaps it is tied to the larger directionless-ness that seems presently to haunt so many of the arts.

Hesitantly, then, I would suggest that a second generalization might safely be tendered: there is a widespread perception that we are not living in a golden age of poetry, and that