It took me some time for me to discover that poetry--especially modern poetry--did not seem accessible or natural to many readers; this gulf in understanding prompted the substance and tone of most of my reviews.My own preference is to focus on poets one by one, to find in each the idiosyncratic voice wonderfully different from any other.It is given to only a handful of people in each century, in any language, to invent a written voice that sounds like no one else's. To write about them is to try to explain, first to oneself and then to others, what common note they strike and how they make it new. To anyone brought up on Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson, the accommodation to the modern--in spite of the links which outnumber the discontinuities--must be sometimes a painful pleasur...