to undermine any attempt at authentic utterance, it was a glorious experience to ride the surge of the opening lines of Crase’s title poem, and then to realize that the emotional uplift afforded by the poem’s rhythmic energies was the result of no trick or gimmick, but of what Emerson called a “metre-making argument.” Emerson famously rubbed his eyes a little, “to see if this sunbeam were no illusion,” while first perusing the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, dispatched to him with the compliments of the author; and The Revisionist excited similar exclamations of wonder from poets and critics across the spectrum when it first appeared. Here are a few extracts from the “chorus of smiles” that greeted it: “Crase has every prospect of becoming one of the strong poets of his own generation” (Harold Bloom); “The Revisionist seems to me an extraordinarily fine book of poems, only the more extraordinary for being a first book . . . Mr. Crase is already brilliantly the master of several distinct and identifiable idioms, all of which he uses to dramatic or comic or even shocking effect” (Anthony Hecht); “This is the most powerful first book I have seen in a long time. The thematic title poem is magnificent, proclaiming the originality which only revision can provide, finding at a late time in parts of a twilit city the highest tales of our whole country” (John Hollander); “The most interesting book of first poems in many years” (Richard Howard); “A marvelous new poet—deeply and absorbingly ‘American,’ unfazed by the complex sentence of our past, and already parsing a future he will help us to live” (James Merrill); “For sheer ambition, ingenuity and wit, Crase stands alone” (Jay Parini); “That Crase’s invocation of the Whitmanian poetic tradition can be so powerful after all these years of overuse and abuse is a small miracle of revisionism itself ” (Phoebe Pettingell); “This is a staggeringly am- XII