Eleanor Wilner: Etudes of Finitude: The Poetry of Maxine Kumin (July 1996)

Noting her resistance to the use of “I” in her own poems, Eleanor Wilner examines the way Maxine Kumin uses autobiographical material not to “call attention to herself” but rather “to the world seen through her eyes.” Wilner conducts close readings of a range of Kumin’s poems, tracing in them a sense of “sanity and…proportion” and linking this sensibility to “an existential facing of limits;” it is precisely her poems’ stringent sense of limits, Wilner suggests, that allows them to convey the enormity of what is beyond them.