The venerable critic, R.P. Blackmur, often repeated the notion–not original with him–that "no order is any good that does not give rise to a fresh disorder." While W.D. Snodgrass is anything but a New Critic, this essentially Romantic idea pervades his essays on the art and craft of poetry, along with a variety of notions about scansion, linguistic development, sexuality, playfulness, brain structure, and the deep linkage of body, personality, and poetry. While exploring the ways in which the successful poem unifies what might otherwise appear to be conflicting or contradictory elements, Snodgrass asserts the value of order and discipline at the same time he insists, Blake-like, that energy must be free to explore unfamiliar dimensions and unheard-of combinations. Several times, he refers slightingly to the "insistent regularities of Western classical and popular music," as contrasted with the "uneven or irregular rhythms" of the sounds of the living body or of non-western musical traditions. The regular or rule-bound composition–musical or poetic–falls into a realm of communication along "the usual channels" that offers anything but poetry. In one almost summary statement, he affirms:

We find in our poetry (art still imitating life) a constant tug of war between sense and nonsense. We’re continually pushing more of a poem into nonsense, into those darker areas where we’re still children given to the joys of communal song and dance. But, also being modern, civilized adults, we keep edging those arcane elements back toward sense.

Or, as Blake might have said, "without contraries is no progression." Snodgrass shows us, through a number of fascinating and illuminating close readings of familiar poems, the ways in which "variation, complication, and return" create the mysterious powers of works of art that "may reveal what the mind does not know it knows." That revelation is closely connected to the title concept (derived from the epigraph for the book, a statement by jazzman Miles Davis) of the difficulty of finding ways to sound like oneself.
          This volume includes six essays that seek to define aspects of the essence of poetry. Snodgrass unifies the book through frequent cross-references and variations, discussing the same poem more than once where it may serve to illustrate different aspects of the poem’s artistic effects. It may as well be said that though the first five essays work to create a progressively more complex and challenging idea of poetry, the final chapter loses that momentum entirely, reading like a familiar introduction to basic terms and concepts of traditional English prosody. While there are connections with the earlier chapters and some interesting new notions developed, the chapter might better have been offered as an appendix (or even a preface), since it does not provide the sense of closure the earlier sections lead the reader to expect.
          Fortunately, the successful essays offer enough challenges and excitement to make this volume well worth reading. Snodgrass seeks to demonstrate the deep connections between sound and meaning, energy and form, the artistry and the bodily sensations of the poet, found in the best poetry. He opens with a quirky description of his own experiences with owls, including having become a foster-parent to an orphaned owl. Learning the sounds and habits of owls leads him to compose a poem about owls, attempting to use a rhythm based on owl calls he has learned; this is a "music"–a sound pattern–that suits the subject of his poem just as he has shown other patterns suit the subjects and experiences of poems by Whitman or Wordsworth. Having established the importance of recognizing the right music (sometimes, as he points out, emulating T.S. Eliot’s claim that the poem may "realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words"), Snodgrass next explores images and concepts as they emerge from the languages of poems, ingeniously analyzing works of Hardy, Hopkins, D.H.Lawrence, Allen Ginsberg, as examples of ways poems may embody "a meaning counter to the author’s conscious beliefs."
          The middle essays in this collection demonstrate Snodgrass’s brilliant command of the resources of a practicing poet as he manipulates lines and stanzas of poems as familiar as Wordsworth’s "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," Robinson’s "Mr. Flood’s Party,"or Wyatt’s "They flee from me," showing how a shift of a word or a stress, the reorganization of a line or stanza to create regularity or decorum, will deprive the poem not only of energy or tension or excitement, but of aspects of the felt meaning of the work. This practice–smoothing out an irregular line or presenting a draft version preserved in a manuscript–is a common device for creative writing workshops, illustrating the notion Snodgrass has presented that fidelity to the rules creates easy banality, while the excitement of the violation is not merely that it surprises or defamiliarizes, but that it makes possible the experience of a dimension of meaning otherwise unavailable. Snodgrass devotes the whole of the fourth essay to poets’ exploitation of extreme versions of such departures–nonsense syllables in ballad refrains, dialects, private codes and languages, puns, portmanteau words, the whole of Joycean jokery. (Here he finally mentions "Jabberwocky," though only to provide a fine German translation of it; perhaps he avoids discussion of Carroll’s nonsense masterpiece because John Ciardi already made good use of it, to much the same purpose, in How Does a Poem Mean?) These two chapters please if only because they prompt the reader to experience anew, in the company of a perceptive guide, some poems that may have become too familiar to be experienced intensely.
          The great achievement of this book occurs in the fifth essay, "Whitman’s Selfsong." Snodgrass has commented in the earlier chapters on several Whitman poems; he has also made references to theories about the hemispheres of the brain, the somatic experiences of the foetus in the womb and the newborn child at the mother’s breast and their possible relations to the acquisition of language, the power of music to release both physical and intellectual energies, and the possible physical foundations for the prevalence of certain sound patterns (stress, duple and triple rhythms) in poetry. (Snodgrass writes, for example, "I have suggested that for poets–perhaps for humans in general–the urge to create such rhythms involves a re-creation . . . of that maternal body rhythm and of that sound’s ambience.") All these notions have been explored by other writers on poetry and Snodgrass acknowledges some of them, though he explicitly avoids engaging in the many theoretical conflicts connected with them; he simply uses them where he finds them helpful and ignores the possible objections or reservations. Whether one finds these notions helpful or suspect in the earlier chapters, their purpose becomes clear in the extended discussion of the reasons why Walt Whitman is our greatest American poet.
          For Snodgrass, Whitman epitomizes poets’ efforts (explained in the preceding chapters) to develop a consistent explanation (doctrine) of life, to find a structure that embodies that doctrine and a syntax that orders the words most effectively to convey it, to set down a musical rhythm that will move the reader to accompany the poet and to remember the experience along the way. The ambiguities of language, syntax, and rhythm, the euphemisms, evasions, and startling self-revelations, the self-conscious weighting and lengthening of lines, all qualities of Whitman’s poems are illustrated in Snodgrass’s careful exposition of his theory that the poems not only make statements about Whitman’s view of life, but truly enact his deepest experiences of his world, both the fulfillments and the painful losses and lonelinesses. Without suggesting either celebration or condemnation, Snodgrass links the poetry to Whitman’s sexuality (as he does again, later and less convincingly, with Marianne Moore), using the linkage as a means of understanding rather than as a partisan ploy. Always, Snodgrass seeks to make more accessible and enjoyable the poetry he loves, stating precisely what is there to be loved and, in some cases, what is there to disappoint.
          The chapter on Whitman could probably be read on its own, and certainly it rewards attention. The preceding chapters, however, and even the following chapter if read as a kind of coda, provide valuable contextual materials that enrich the experience of Snodgrass’s generous reading of Whitman. The book as a whole feels like a tour guided by an experienced craftsman, an expert on the making of the works on display; he offers some commentary that is simple and obvious, some that is probably familiar from other sources; most valuably, however, he knows how to point out what is both interesting and informative, then to allow us to experience the work itself, without interference. While he deals with theoretical matters, and there is some technical language (mostly drawn from traditional prosody), there is none of the theorists’ jargon nor obfuscation. As has been true of his poetry, Snodgrass’s commentary combines the matter of his private life and personal responses with the precise observation and description that make such critical writing (as well as such poetry) emotionally compelling and lasting.