Eleanor Wilner: The Revolving Door of the Imagination (January 2009)

“Poetry at its most powerful,” Eleanor Wilner argues, allows us to “shift away” from what we expect to see; she suggests that such shifts can occur when the speaker finds ways to move “out of the shallows of the ego” and into a deeper kind of consciousness. Wilner examines poems by Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, Radcliffe Squires and Gerald Stern to locate such moments of transformation— and consider the craft strategies that make them possible.