These two collections of critical essays are by writers whose principal work is poetry. Robert Pinsky, who was born in 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey, has written three full-length books of verse. Seamus Heaney, who was born in 1939 in County Deny, Ireland, has written eight. As one might expect, nearly all of the pieces in these two volumes are devoted to poetry. Heaney’s subjects include the verse of W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Osip Mandelstam; Pinsky offers essays on William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, and Seamus Heaney. Pinsky’s book also contains a few memoir-essays, which, like those in Preoccupations (1980), Seamus Heaney’s earlier collection of critical essays, enlarge upon the poet’s critical position. What unites Heaney and Pinsky as critics is an overriding concern with the relationship between art and life.

There is a distinct critical ambivalence running through Pinsky’s book, and it is perhaps best seen in the title essay. In this piece, Pinsky contrasts imaginative literature, which offers “a kind of metaphysical . . . hope, a sense of possibility” with our experience of the world, which tends to deny such hope. (The phrase “a kind of metaphysical hope, a sense of possibility” is used to describe an Isaac Babel story, “An Evening at the Empress’s,” but Pinsky has it stand for the metaphysical potentialities of all literature.) Acknowledging both despair and hope—hope understood here as the desire to persist in the face of