[Goodman says of The Lordly Hudson, his collected poems]: "I have not tried much for individual beautiful poems-though I think I have occasionally hit one by luck -but 1 am more satisfied with the whole than with the parts." Their very existence, then, "proving" something, they represent, these poems taken as a whole, an important thrust of Goodman's total effort, an achievement refractory to assessment for two reasons: not only do we resist a reading of a man's poems as if they were one poem, the parts and pieces being no more than inflections of his cause rather than individual victories over the Silence, but further we resist regarding a man's poems as merely another weapon in his armory-modernism has made the poet's office such an hieratic one that it is something of a heresy to consider the writing of poems as no more than a normative function .... Not surprisingly, The Lordly Hudson-in which Goodman's perennial burden, man in the world he has made for himself, is explored,...