Charles Edward Eaton, in New and Selected Poems, as elsewhere, is a remarkable poet, a fine metrist and stylist, and a close disciple of Wallace Stevens in artistic skill and finesse as well as in theory and topics. Many a poet who buys whole hog and pen Stevens’ often-prevalent view of poetics (and thus poetry)...

“Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense . . . just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge Margaret Atwood writes in her poem “Mushrooms”: Here is the handful of shadow I have brought back to you, this...