Mr. Wiman reminds us of the vital truth that the critic Yvor Winters taught, and that most contemporary poets refuse to hear: that form, in a good poem, does not stem from a deficiency of feeling, but from its painful excess. "Art — or, to be more precise, form — is not only what enables artists to experience this sense of wrongness at all ... it is their only hope of wholeness and release."

-'The Poet's Ambition'