William Logan's darkly incisive, sometimes caustic, and always lively reviews of contemporary poetry have won him legions of admirers and his fair share of detractors. In Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods, Logan returns to some of the greatest poems in English literature to reveal what we may not have seen before and what his critical eye can do with what he loves. In essays that pair different poems—"Ozymandias," "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "In a Station of the Metro," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," among others—Logan reconciles history and poetry to provide new ways of reading poets ranging from Shakespeare and Shelley to Lowell and Heaney.
In these striking essays, Logan presents the poetry of the past through the lens of the past, attempting to brings poems back to the world in which they were made. Logan's criticism is informed by the material culture of...