While he lived, Paul Goodman had little reputation as a poet, just as he had little reputation as a political thinker in the generally accepted sense of the term. There was misunderstanding in both cases. His well known activity as a social critic, dealing with moral, psychological, and cultural issues, tended to obscure his public character as artist. ... Goodman himself contributed to the general impression that his social insight had no political dimensions, and no political consequences. First, he made frequent and explicit denials of interest or competence in politics. (p. 23) Further, Goodman was eager to be loved and praised, perhaps more than most, because he had never said goodbye to his own feelings, and for that reason he felt his long eclipse to be a kind of painful exile. His special ambition was to be of use, and the pain of living for so long with that ideal unrealized may have made him diffident about those powers of his that were not blindingly obvious, at least to him. In talking about politics, which he persistently called by other names, diffidence sometimes made him sound arch, as if by way of apology. Or it allowed him to advance proposals that he called practical, without paying a decent attention to the...